Modern abdominal surgery : the Bradshaw lecture delivered at the Royal College of Surgeons of England, December 18th, 1890 : with an appendix on the castration of women / by Sir T. Spencer Wells.

Date:
1891
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Modern abdominal surgery : the Bradshaw lecture delivered at the Royal College of Surgeons of England, December 18th, 1890 : with an appendix on the castration of women / by Sir T. Spencer Wells. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    over each other's loyalty, and sounding an alarm in case of default. Of late, the laparotomy epidemic has called for one of these challenges. It has roused a feeling not of jealousy, but of suspicion and concern for professional honour. When men in clubs begin to jeer at gynaecological domiciliary fussiness, and husbands are furious at the rumours of mysterious diseases, unknown to Sydenham and Cullen, being rife among their wives and daughters, there must be something wrong. It is time to look into the matter. If we hold the mirror up to Nature, only changing the sex of the actors, the spectacle is not flattering. Fancy the reflected picture of a coterie of the Marthas of the profession in conclave, promulgating the doctrine that most of the unmanageable maladies of men were to be traced to some morbid change in their genitals, founding societies for the discussion of them and hospitals for the cure of them, one of them sitting in her consultation chair, with her little stove by her side and her irons all hot, searing every man as he passed before her ; another gravely proposing to bring on the millennium by snuffing out the reproductive powers of all fools, lunatics, and criminals ; a third getting up and declaring that she found, at least, seven or eight of every ten men in her wards with some condition of his appendages which would prove to be in- curable without surgical treatment, and a bevy of the younger disciples crowding around the confabulatory table with oblations of soup-platefuls of the said appendages ; if too, we saw, in this magic mirror, ignorant boys being castrated almost impromptu, hundreds of emasculated beings moping about and bemoaning their doltish credulity, showers of cases, ready for cutting, falling like manna, every morning, at one spot, while in another they drop in at the rate of one and a half the year—should we not, to our shame, see ourselves as others see us ? And if at the same time we were to hear a few of the sisterhood, more frightened than shocked, muttering remonstrances, and crying out, like the Ephesians of old, that their craft was in danger—say, should we not be bound to enter the strongest protest against their selfish wailings, and in- dignantly to denounce such follies as a personal degradation, a crime against society, and a dishonour to the profession ] PRIXTKD BY SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., XEW-STKEET SQUARE LONDON