The Bolivar bulletin. (Bolivar, Tenn.) 1888-1946, 1897-06-18

| 49, anu L hS
worst calamity of the race punished
with the very worst punishment. AND
then come and look at the insane asy
lums of Utica and Kirkbride -sofaed
and pictured, libraried, concerted, I'M
/ til all the arts and adornments come tt
coax recfeant reason to assume hei
| throne. Look at Edward Jenner, the
| great hero of medicine. Four hun
dred thousand people annually dying
in Europe from the smallpox, Jen
ner finds that by the inocu1a
ton of people with vaccine from &
cow, the great ,courge of nations may
| be arrested. The ministers of the Cos
| pei denounced vaccination; small wits
caricatured Edward Jenner as riding
in a great procession on the back of d
cow; and grave men expressed 1t a.
their opinion that all the diseases OF
| the brute creation would be trans
planted into the human family; and
they gave instances where, they said
actually horns had come out on the
| fOreheads of innocent persons, and
! people had begun to chew the cud
But DIR. Jenner, the hero of medicine,
went on fighting for vaccination until
| it has been estimated that one doctor,
in fifty years, has saved more lives
| than all the battles of any one century
destroyed!
Passing along the streets of Edin-
burgh few weeks after the death OF
Sir James Y. Simpson, saw the photo
graph of the doctor in all the windows
of the shops and stores, and well might
that photograph be put in every win
dow, for he first used chloroform as an
anaesthetic agent. In other days they
tried to dull human pain by the has
heesh of the Arabs and the madrepore
of the Roman and the Greek; but it was
left to DR.. James Simpson to introduce
chloroform as an anaesthetic. Alas
for the writhing subjects of surgery in
other centuries! Blessed be God for
that wet sponge or vial in the hand of
the operating surgeon in the clinical
department of the medical college, or
in the sick room of the domestic circle,
or on the battlefield amid thousands
of amputa tions. Napoleon, after a
battle, rode along the line and saw
under a tree, standing in the
snow, Larrey, the surgeon, oper-
ating upon the wounded. Napoleon
passed on, and twenty-four hours af-
terward came along the same place,
and he saw the same surgeon operating
in the same place, and he had not left
it. Alas for the battle-fields without
chloroform. But now, the soldier boy
takes few breaths from the sponge
and forgets all the pang of the gun
shot fracture, and while the surgeons
of the field hospital are standing
around him he lies there dreaming of
home, and mother, and Heaven. No
more parents standing around suffer
ing child, struggling to get away from
the sharp instrument, but mild slumber
instead of excruciation, and the child
wakes up and says: Father, what's
the matter? What's the doctor here
to-day for?" Oh, blessed be God for
James Y. Simpson and the heaven-de-
scended mercies of chloroform.
The medical profession steps into the
courtroom, and, after conflicting wit
nesses have left everything in a fog, by
chemical analyses shows the guilt or
innocence of the prisoner, as by mathe-
NAUTICAL demonstration, thus adding
honors to medical Jurisprudence.
This profession has done wonders for
public hygiene! How often they have
stood between this nation and Asiatic
cholera, and the yellow fever. The
monuments in Greenwood, and Mount
Auburn, and Laurel Hill tell some
thing of the story of those men who
stood face to face with pestilence in
southern cities, until, staggering in
fhair Si0l-nnSC fhou t11T hi a6
across the corpseS of those whom they
had come to save. This profession has
been the successful advocate of ven
tilation, sewerage, drainage and fumi-
cation, until their sentiments were
well expressed by Lord Palmerston,
when he said to the English nation at
the time fast had been proclaimed to
keep off great pestilence: ''Clean your
or death will ravage, notwith-
standing all the prayers of this nation.
Clean your streets, and then call on
God for help.
See what this profession has done
for human longevity. There was such
a fearful substraction from human life
that there was a prospect that within
a few centuries this world would be
leu Audm
started with a whole eternity of earth
ly existence before him; but he cut off
the most of it and only comparatively
few years were left-oUly 700 years of
life, and then 500, and then 400, and
then 200, and then 100, and then so, and
then the average of human life came
to 40, and then it dropped to Is. But
medical science came in, and since the
sixteenth century the average of human
life has risen from IS years to Al; and
it will continue to rise until the aver
age of human life will be so, and it
will be 60, and it will be 20, and man
will have no right to die before 80, and
the prophecy of Isaiah will be literally
fulfilled: 'And the child shall die
hundred years old" The millennium
for the souls of men will be the mil
lenium for the bodies of men. Sin
done, disease will be donc-the clergy
man and the physician getting through
with their work at the same time.
But it seems to me that the most
beautiful benediction the medical pro-
fession has been dropped upon the poor.
No excuse now for anyone's not hav-
ing scientific attendance. Dispensaries
and infirmarieS everywhere under the
control of the best doctors, some of
them poorly paid, some of them not
paid at all. A half-starved woman
comes out from the low tenement house
into the dispensary, and unwraps the
rags from her babe, a bundle of ulcers,
and rheum, and pustules, and over that
little sufferer bends the accumulated
wisdom of the ages, from Esculapius
down to last weeks autopsy. In one
in one year, 100, 900 prescrip-
tions were issued. Why do 1 show you
what God has allowed this profession
to do? Is it to stir up you vanity? Oh,
no. The day has gone by for pompous