The Address Delivered in the Section of Public Medicine
Authors: A. Carpenter
Journal: BMJ (1882)

THE BRITISH JEDICAL VOURNAL 265 done with a degree of safety and a rate of mortality more favourable than that of the ordinary capital operations not very long ago.Wounds of the intestine, except a few rarer cases where the damage was superficial and easily reached, have hitherto been left to the tender mercies of the vis medicatrix naur4, and a little opium.Now they are sought for and stitched up, and surgically treated like any other wound, and the responsibility of the case is trasferred from nature to the surgeon.We have to record the series of operations which come under the general head of osteotomy, by which bent limbs are made symmetrical, and knock-knees straightened, and other osseous de.formities of the body corrected; and we have bedses Ingenious improvements of all kinds in our appliances; new instruments, new ligatures, bandajeN and whatever other things the surgeon requires in his daily work, far too numerous to mention.Undoubtedly, a large share of these successful results is due to the introduction of the antiseptic treatment of wounds, which gives the operator more confidence that the wound which he makes will not, of itself, prove a source of danger to his patient ; and we necessrily come to the conclusion that anxsthetics and antiseptics combined have been the chief steps by which we have reached this high point on the road to success.During the year that now expires, since our last annual meeting, among those who have gone to their last home are one or two whose names, well known in years gone by, which I should like to mention before I sit down.James Luke, formerly of the London IHospital, a man of high sur- gical note in my earlier days, twice President of the Royal College of Surgeons, of which he became a member sixty years ago, member of the Council and examiner, died at the tood old age of 82.He had, of course, retired from work for a considerable time: so much so' that, probably, the younger generation of you scarcely knew his name.He was distinguished for hard and steady work as an anatomist and surgeon, and for his practical knowledge of our branch of the pro- fession.I believe that he was the first to insist upon a small incision in the operation for strangulated hernia, instead of the older plan, which I have seen adopted, of laying open the skin, and coverings, and sac, from top to bottom, whatever the size of the rupture.John Flint South, of St. Thomas's Hospital, another patriarch, for- merly president, councillor, and examiner of the College, whose mem- bership uated from the year 18I9, had reached his eighty-fifth year.He was an accomplished surgeon of the old school, highly educated be- yond the usual limits of a professional education, with strong classical and literary tastes; and he also did some good work for the advance- ment of the surgery of his time.Then Tames Spence, the well-known distinguished surgeon, and pro- essor of surgery in Edinburgh University, our orator when we met at Edinburgh in 1875, died at work this year, at an advanced age.And Pirogoff of St. Petersburg, whom we all know by name, and who is recognised as one of the surgical authorities of our time, died also at an advanced age, but still at work.Professor Busch, of the University of Bonn, who was in London last year at the meeting of the International Congress, died at the earlier age of fifty-five.He is stated to have been a favourite pupil of the famous Johann MUller, the physiologist, and the cause of his death was perforation of the appendix vermiformis.*Nearer home, Mr. Gore of Bath died almost at work, in his eighty- third year-a skilful provincial surgeon, of great note in our neighbour- hood; and Dr. Greenhow of Newcastle, once an active member of our Association, reached the great age of ninety years.He became a member of the College of Surgeons in 1814, and was made Fellow in the first batch of Fellows created in I843.He was a first-rate