Antiseptic surgery : an address delivered at St. Thomas's Hospital : with the subsequent debate to which are added a short statement of the theory of the antiseptic method, a description of the materials employed in carrying it out, and some applications of the method to operations and injuries in different regions of the body, and to wounds received in war / by William MacCormac.

Date:
1880
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Antiseptic surgery : an address delivered at St. Thomas's Hospital : with the subsequent debate to which are added a short statement of the theory of the antiseptic method, a description of the materials employed in carrying it out, and some applications of the method to operations and injuries in different regions of the body, and to wounds received in war / by William MacCormac. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.

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    per cent, in the first period of the thirty years to less than 10 per cent, in the last. Let me repeat, I do not pretend to exactness ill these numbers; there are good reasons why exactness cannoc yet be attained; but they may serve to express with sufficient accuracy the diminution of mortality after operations at St. Bar- tholomew's and in my own practice, and, I believe, at many similar hospitals, and in the practice of other surgeons. How has this result been obtained 1 The reports from some hospitals abroad show that a similar but even more striking result has quickly followed the introduction of antiseptic surgery, and that no other influence than this has been at work in them. I suspect that the belief in the absence of all other good influ- ences is not quite just; but certainly in this country we have no facts that can be compared with theirs, and even those amongst us who are most devoted to antiseptic treatment can hardly doubt (that the good results they have obtained may have been due, in some measure, to other less observed good influences. Let me point out what have been the chief good influences brought to bear on the consequences of operations duiing the last thirty years, especially on those consequences against which the antiseptic treatment is directed. But, first, as I am referring at pi'esent to mortalities alone, it is to be observed that, in this country and in nearly all our hospitals, a large proportion of the patients are not susceptible of the fatal influences of the infective diseases. Whether this is to be ascribed to the power of resistance possessed by the patients or to a defective quantity or intensity of the in- fective material, or to both, I need not now consider. The fact is, that in the worst times for operative surgery that I have known a large percentage, 60, 70, or more even, of those who underwent capital operations, escaped death, and, 1 think I may say, escaped erysipelas, pyfemia, and the other perils against which antiseptics and our other methods of protection are directed. This large percentage, therefore,—this number of insusceptible or, as I may call them, not poisonable people, must be left out of account in our estimates of the comparative utilities of modern methods of protection. They escape now as they did then. When, with our present wise dread of putrid and infectious matter, we look back at the treatment some of them received, and the manner of dressing their wounds, it may seem strange that any should have escaped. Every stump, and every large wound at its first dressing difiused an abominable stench G 2