Modern surgery and its making : a tribute to Listerism / by C.W. Saleeby.

  • Caleb Saleeby
Date:
[1912?]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Modern surgery and its making : a tribute to Listerism / by C.W. Saleeby. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    14/376 (page 2)
    been, not merely for the purposes of general culture, nor just appreciation of greatness, but because of the many public needs which are involved in Listerism and cannot be met until public opinion is acquainted with the facts. It was with astonishment and incredulity, some years ago, when planning the New Library of Medi- cine, that I failed to discover any existing book devoted to this subject, of which the importance in- creases daily as the powers of the surgeon become more extended. One knew that such questions as Infant Mortality and the Prevention of Tuberculosis and the Hygiene of Mind had never been properly dealt with in any organic and complete manner, either for the public or the profession. Surprising though these lacuna; were, they could be understood, for the daily preventable slaughter of infants had to wait for atten- tion until the development of what may be called the Public Health Conscience in the community—and that is scarcely yet a stripling ; and, similarly, the prevention of tuberculosis could not be dealt with until the discovery of the tubercle bacillus and its modes of transference from the sick to the sound. But though the books of Sir George Newman and Dr. Newsholme and Sir Thomas Clouston should doubtless have been written long before, they were not nearly so overdue as a volume on Modern Surgery, its history, its powers, and its place in the State ; for, after all, however inadequate the public conscious- ness of the fact, this mighty deed, to which we are one and all at this hour incalculably indebted, dates as far back as the later sixties of the nineteenth cen- tury for its essential doing. Lord Lister himself, in a letter which is a cherished possession, declined on the grounds of advancing