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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    Let us remain with him, if only for a moment, for he is an 1268) inspiration and a teacher for us all, as great perhaps for his time as the world has seen or will ever see again. How fascinating to follow the groping in the dark and the searching for the light of a great mind! How refreshing and what a lesson is his honest doubt! “ I am not able under such circumstances,” he writes,' “ decidedly to say which is the best practice, whether to leave the slough to separate, or to make a small opening and allow the blood to escape slowly from the cavity.” And again, speaking of that com- mon class of injuries in which the wound communicates ex- ternally and the blood has formed a scab over the breach, he sa}'s:“ “But this operation of nature reduces the injury to the state of a mere superficial wound, and the blood which is continued from the scab to the more deeply seated parts, retaining its living 'principle [italics mine], just as the nat- ural parts do at the bottom of a superficial wound, the skin [269] is formed under the scab in the one case as in the other; yet if the scab should either irritate or a part underneath lose its uniting powers, then inflammation and even sometimes sup- puration may be produced.” Here Hunter recognizes facts which have been fully appreciated only in recent years, that there is a power for good in the blood, that the blood clot has a value and should be undisturbed, and that the dry scab usually desirable is sometimes harmful. LTnder the conditions existing until the time of Hunter near the end of the eighteenth century, it was doubtless right that the practising surgeon should have been sharply differ- entiated in social position and professional standing from the physician proper, the latter being equipped with all the academic knowledge of the time, the former an apprentice of the barber shops. “ The reasoning of the army surgeons en- dured as butter in the sun,” wrote Abraham a Gehema in 1690, and the army commanded the services of the best sur- geons. Nevertheless, it is often refreshing to find records of sound personal observations in the writings of the old sur- geons, who, rude and unlettered though they might be, were ' Hunter, Palmer's ed., Vol. Ill, p. 247. ' Op. elt., p. 252.