The influence of vivisection on human surgery / by Sampson Gamgee.

  • Gamgee, Sampson, 1828-1886.
Date:
1882
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The influence of vivisection on human surgery / by Sampson Gamgee. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    To make good this statement in all its bearings would demand a review of the history of Surgery, and of those departments of Medical Science with which it is inseparably linked; but such a retrospect, at once comprehensive and impartial, is simply out of the question within the limits of an Address. In support of the proposition T have laid down, time will only allow me to produce a few proofs. I vouch for their authenticity, and trust to your approving their cogency. Let us glance at the state of Surgery in the middle of the last century, a date comparatively so recent, that the grand¬ fathers of many of those I am addressing were then in ripe manhood. The year 1750 is memorable for the death of Jean Louis Petit, whose name will always live in surgical dressing rooms with his tourniquet, and whom ripe students of our art revere as a master, scarcely second to Ambroise Pare. In that same year Haller, Morgagni and the french surgical Academicians were at their zenith, and William Cheselden, stricken with paralysis, left Chelsea Hospital,—happily not before he had well assured his brightest title to enduring fame. fit has been said of Sir Humphrey Davy that Michael < * . i j j Faladay Was his greatest discovery; and so the master of ltnatomy 4rid, nothing greater, or more useful, than the first lessons in surgery which he imparted to John Hunter. Born in 1728 John Hunter was 22 when he left Cheselden to enter as surgeon pupil at St. Bartholomew’s, where Percival Pott, at 36 years of age, had been appointed to the full surgeoncy the preceding year. So that you see the epoch I have chosen was a golden one for surgical science