Clinical lectures on diseases of the urinary organs : delivered at University College Hospital / by Sir Henry Thompson.

  • Thompson, Henry, Sir, 1820-1904.
Date:
1882
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Clinical lectures on diseases of the urinary organs : delivered at University College Hospital / by Sir Henry Thompson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    claims the right to exercise a choice, although he may not always manifest his wisdom in doing so; but it belongs to us to give him a full view o£ the relative merits of both methods. What they are I have endeavoured impartially to set before you. LECTURE XIX. ON THE FUTURE OF OPERATIVE SURGERY FOR STONE IN THE BLADDER. (^Delivered before the Midland Medical Society at Birmingham, November 1873.) [After a few observations relative to the occasion of his visit and the selection of the subject. Sir Henry Thompson proceeded as follows :—] The title I have chosen may probably, at first sight, suggest to you rather a specu- lative consideration o£ the subject than a practical one. On the contrary, I desire that my treatment of it should be wholly practical, and I hope before the conclusion of my remarks to convince you that it is so. I admit that it is not iisual to com- mence the study of any surgical procedure by a forecast of what it may possibly become in the future. You know that at the outset of such labour one generally first wades through some epitome of the ancient authors; and that most writers commence by observing that Galen and Hippocrates alluded to the subject, or, if they did not, by equally stating that fact; and so onwards through the learned Arabians, down to the time of the Renais- sance for the experience of Ambrose Pare, Richard Wiseman, and the rest; and thus finally arriving by degrees at our own era. But this method, interesting and instructive as it is, is by no means that which I intend to follow to-night. I propose distinctly a question relating to the future, and not at all to the past, I do so because I think we have arrived at a point in the history of surgical operations for stone in the bladder at which we are entitled to do that. Forecast, or prophecy —which is perhaps a rather more for- midable word than I like—becomes always possible, to a greater or less extent, when we are v/ell acquainted with the existing data belonging to, or constituting, the matter concerning which a prediction is to be made. Now, I doubt if there is any surgical subject to which this axiom better applies than that which I have chosen for discussion. I commence then, boldly, by saying that I have come to the conclusion that stone in the bladder, like many other maladies, is an exterminable one. I believe that this grave malady, which has tested surgical skill during two thousand years and produced a ponderous literature —which has been dreaded beyond all by mankind, and has been the source of untold suffering to thousands in every age—is nevertheless a malady which may be exterminated; so far, that is, as it is a painful and dangerous one. The greatest achievements of the healing art, throughout all time, are those which have been connected not merely with the cure but with the prevention or extermination of human maladies. You know that I can name diseases of the gravest kind which, thanks to scientific medicinCj do not now exist. The plague, at all events with very slight exception, is in Europe a matter of history, and has been so for a long period. Small-pox is, •it the present moment, simply an ana- chronism. It has no right or title to existence, and shows itself only because some people are foolish or ignorant. I will go further, and say that typhoid and other eruptive fevers are falling into the same category, and only await increased human intelligence and determination to become things of the past. And I feel sure you will agree with me that cholera must equally become siibject to our control. Indeed, it is impossible that it can be otherwise. All these glorious conquests are the result of 'medical' work, conventionally so distinguished, as something differing from ' surgical' work ; although I protest against this most un- natural divorce between two divisions of the healing art which never can be 2