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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    [269] dealing with realities at a time when the minds of physicians were buried in scholastic subtleties and fruitless specula- tions. In the German universities, when chairs of surgery were first created, it was considered beneath the dignity of the physician who taught the doctrines of this art actually to practise it. Thus Haller (1708-77) about the middle of the eighteenth century taught, among other things, surgery both in Goettingen and Berne, but never demeaned himself to perform an operation. Billroth,’ commenting on this ar- rangement, says: “ That Albrecht von Haller in Berne should for many years have lectured on surgery without ever having touched a single human creature with the knife is for us, in these days, hard to comprehend.” How different apparently from Haller’s was the attitude of mind at that time of John Hunter (1728-93) in England, whose practice yielded a yearly income of six thousand guineas; and yet in spirit perhaps not so different after all, as exemplified by the remark to an assistant, “ Well, Lynn, I must go and earn this damn guinea, or I shall be sure to want it to-morrow.” Even in America a little more than a hundred years ago a definite stigma still adhered to the exercise of the surgeon’s art. Thus writes the eminent Dr. John Morgan, founder of the Medical Department of the College of Philadelphia, later the University of Pennsylvania, in a letter from London, November 10, 1764, to Dr. Cullen, after a long period of study abroad: “ I am now preparing for America to see whether, after fourteen years of devotion to medicine, I can get my living without turning apothecary or practitioner of surgery.” ® It was not until the year 1800 that the Eoyal College of Surgeons received its charter, and then only with great diffi- culty. Parliament had again and again refused to grant a new charter to the disbanded “ Company of Surgeons.” Lord Thurlow is reported to have said in the House of Lords when the bill had passed the Commons: “ There is no more science in surgery than in butchering,” and it was only when the Court of Examiners, a body still in existence, decided to ’’ Leliren \i. Lernen, p. 45. Wien, 1876. ® Packard, The History of Medicine in the United States, p. 191.