The influence of anæsthesia on the surgery of the nineteenth century : address of the president / by J. Collins Warren, M.D., LL.D., Boston.

  • Warren, John Collins, 1842-1927
Date:
[1897?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The influence of anæsthesia on the surgery of the nineteenth century : address of the president / by J. Collins Warren, M.D., LL.D., Boston. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    well said: “ Surgeons went on in every country cutting and burning, and patients went on writhing and screaming until, on October 16, 1846, when surgical anaesthesia became the priceless heritage of the civilized world.” Surgery after Anaesthesia. Warren, writing in 1848, says: “ A new era has opened to the operating surgeon. With what fresh vigor does the living surgeon, who is ready to resign the scalpel, grasp it and wish again to go through his career under the new auspices? Since the fear of pain has diminished, the number of surgical opera¬ tions has remarkably increased, at least in our vicinity.” An editorial article in the Lancet, written about six months after ether was first used in Boston, states that the number of operations in the London hospitals had more than doubled. Mason Warren writes : “ The domain of surgery has been enlarged by admitting into the list of justifiable operations some whose severity would otherwise in most cases have prevented even the thought of attempting them.” Erichsen writes in 1878: “ During the last thirty years the actual number of operations performed in hospitals has enor¬ mously increased, and probably in a great measure owing to the employment of anaesthetics.” Marshall, the Emeritus Professor of Surgery at the Univer¬ sity College Hospital, in 1885 compared the surgical work of the hospital in Liston’s time, in 1844, and his own.1 Although the proportion of fractures and wounds was about the same in the two periods under comparison, the number of surgical cases admitted to the hospital in 1885 was more than double the number admitted in 1844. A numerical comparison, however, gives an inadequate idea of the increased amount of surgical cases, for in 1844 simple cases were treated as out¬ patients, and venereal cases in large numbers were admitted to the wards. In 1883 more patients with malignant growths came 1 British Medical Journal, August 8, 1885.