The surgeon's vade mecum : a manual of modern surgery / by Robert Druitt.

  • Druitt, Robert, 1814-1883.
Date:
1878
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The surgeon's vade mecum : a manual of modern surgery / by Robert Druitt. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    PBEFACE. This is the eleventh edition of a work first published nearly forty- years ago, the successive editions of which have been received with a favour which I hope will be continued to the present one. The object is to give an outline of the science and practice of surgery. Space forbids an exhaustive treatment of any subject, but the endeavour has been to render the book accurate as far as it goes, and so to make it a trustworthy foundation for the study of more complete treatises and monographs. No one can revise such a work so often as I have done without becoming conscious of the incessant improvement in our conception of the structure and functions of the most elementary parts of the animal body—a conception which forms the scientific basis of every branch of medicine. ' Old terms and ideas are everywhere under- going modification. Beale's term, bioplasm, has been adopted as the best name for the minute and universally diffused particles of living matter, which do the real work of life in the organised body—whether in health or disease. Then, starting with the striking dictum of Virchow, that the one common effect of injury of all organised beings, animals and plants alike, is hypertrophy, or multiplication of bioplasm (protoplasm or cell-growth), the student is conducted through the different varieties of hypertrophy; —such as the beneficial multiplication of bioplasm set on foot for the repair of injury, and those aberrant and mischievous processes which are present in inflammation and fever, suppuration and pyaemia. He is then led on to notice other conditions of local disease, such as ulceration and mortification, and then certain diatheses or constitutional conditions, each of which is attended with some peculiarity in the morbid development of bioplasm. Such are scrofula, the leprosy, and tumours.