Addresses on surgical subjects / by Sir Berkeley Moynihan.

  • Berkeley Moynihan
Date:
1928
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Addresses on surgical subjects / by Sir Berkeley Moynihan. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    enemies. We, who are in active work to-day, are perhaps unable to measure the full extent of that victory; for during the long fight, lasting almost exactly sixty years, our standards have been so changed that we cannot truthfully compare our work with that of our intellectual ancestors. Operations from time immemorial so mortal as to be prohibitive are now freely performed without anxiety. Operations formerly unimaginable are now matters of everyday occurrence. The mere tale of such work done does not adequately illustrate the change. On my last day as surgeon, on the full staff of my hos¬ pital, I performed six abdominal operations. Not one ol these was practised by any member of our staff during the year in which I became house surgeon, nor had such a diagnosis as was made in three of these cases, and veri¬ fied at the time of operation, ever then been attempted in the history of medicine. Above all, a statement of facts and a comparison of methods does not in adequate degree convey to our minds the difference of outlook of the intellectual and spiritual approach of a man to his daily task, as between the surgeon in the days before Lister and since. It is barely possible for us to imagine how men felt about their daily work when an eminent surgeon could speak of his hospital as a “house of death”; when hospitals “were little short of pest houses,” as Lister said1; and when the oppressive mortality com¬ pelled the closure of wards or of a whole hospital for months, until the curse was lifted from them. Before and After Lister The change, of incalculable benefit to humanity, is due to one man, Lister.2 Before Lister’s time the surgeon dreaded the almost inevitable consequences of his opera-