The training of the surgeon : the annual address in medicine delivered at Yale University, June 27, 1904 / by William Stewart Halsted.

  • Halsted, William, 1852-1922.
Date:
[1904]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The training of the surgeon : the annual address in medicine delivered at Yale University, June 27, 1904 / by William Stewart Halsted. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    [369] country. In its influence upon the development of medical teaching the University of Leyden occupies historically the flrst position. The relation of surgery to general medicine at the end of the eighteenth century was in Germany much less satisfac- tory than in Great Britain and in France. Under the teacher of clinical medicine was a surgeon who demonstrated the sur- gical cases. When Eeil was called from Halle to Berlin in 1810 as professor of medicine, he naturally expected that the customary relations would be preserved and that Carl Fer- dinand Graefe, a young protege of Wilhelm v. Humboldt, [370] would operate under his direction. But by a mandate from the throne the independence of Graefe and of surgery was established. Graefe was given a responsible post as army surgeon, and his services in war were of such a high order and so greatly esteemed by the King that an independent sur- gical clinic was soon established and entrusted to him. The first equipment of this clinic was a very modest one, con- forming to the straightened, condition of the state’s ex- chequer. Five times in the first nine years of its existence his hospital of ten beds was obliged to seek new quarters, but in 1818 it was located at the site of the present surgical clinic of the University of Berlin. Philipp v. Walther, his illus- trious contemporary, gives his impressions of Graefe’s clinic, which he visited in 1834: “A remarkable, splendid spectacle, conducted in a dauntless and highly gifted manner is Graefe’s clinic in Berlin; we have no prototype of it either in France, England, North Italy or Holland. Its disposition is entirely national, purely German.” “ What changes have taken place in a single generation,” writes von Bergmann,’“ “ changes brought about by the same indefatigable activity of the Ger- man clinical teachers and by their absolute devotion to their work, the devotion springing from innermost convictions which made it possible for Graefe after fifteen years of clini- cal toil to win such testimonials from his fellows.” In the year 1876, the year when I first walked the wards of Bellevue Hospital, New Nork, the dawn of modern surgery Die Entwickelung des chirurgischen Unterrichts in Preussen. Berlin, 1893.