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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    appeal to the Crown, to King George III, that the charter [269] was ultimately obtained. From the days of the great Hohen- staufen, Frederick II, who in 1231 commanded the teachers at Salernum diligently to cultivate the art of dissection, up to the present time medicine has repeatedly been aided and advanced by the enlightened intervention of kings and rulers. When Maria Theresa brought Gerhard van Swieten from Leyden to Vienna in the face of great opposition from the profession, she laid the foundations of the fame of the medi- cal school of Vienna and she placed to her credit an achieve- ment from which Austria and Germany still profit. In Prussia medicine has enjoyed the support of the Crown without in- terruption from the time of Frederick I to the present day. The splendid new equipment of the surgical department of the University of Berlin is largely the result of Emperor William IPs wisdom and liberality. “A king or a privileged class,” writes President Hadley, “ ruling in accordance with traditions and trying to act for the interests of the people, will give a much larger measure of real freedom than is possible under a democracy whose members have no respect for the past and no higher aim than their own selfish advancement.” The founding of the Academy of Surgery in Paris, in 1731, has been referred to as the turning stake in the history of surgery, as the starting line of its scientific labors and of its true career, and the French regard the five anatomical demonstrations made a few years before by the surgeon La Peyronie in the College of St. Come as the inauguration of the new epoch. Von Bergmann reminds us that a Theatrum Anatomicum for students of surgery was erected in Berlin in 1713, but this exerted no such wide influence as the Paris Academy. The development of clinical teaching can be traced by unbroken tradition directly to Boerhaave, profes- sor at the University of Leyden in the early part of the eighteenth century, and a teacher of unsurpassed influence and renown. His pupils carried the new methods to Austria, to Germany, to Edinburgh, and their descendants in the faith were the founders of the early medical schools in this “Arthur T. Hadley, The Relations between Freedom and Responsibility in the Evolution of Democratic Government. Chas. Scribner’s Sons, 1903.