An account of seventy-six consecutive cases of abdominal section : (performed between December 23, 1879 and November 1, 1880) / [R.L. Tait].
- Lawson Tait
- Date:
- [1880]
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: An account of seventy-six consecutive cases of abdominal section : (performed between December 23, 1879 and November 1, 1880) / [R.L. Tait]. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.
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![badly for the tone of morality of the writer. Fortunately it is easily met by the facts of the case. In hospital practice, of course, there is no such temptation, and the patients are further ])rotected by the custom of consultations amongst the staff. In private practice the patients must almost always be operated on by a specialist, and no operating surgeon ever should perform such an operation without full consultation with and the concui-- rence of the medical attendant; and I am perfectly certain that few patients, if any, would consent to an operation of any kind being performed without the consent of their family medicjil adviser. The writer in the British Medical Journal further states that this operation will prove a lucrative field of practice, and that therefore it demands special carefulness. This again is the assumption of a person ignorant of the facts. It will always be chiefly a hospital operation, for the conditions which require it are those which can generally be obviated by the rest, atten- tion, and. luxury which are the property of those who can pay fees. For more than three-fourths of my cases I have not received any fee, and for the remainder I have had small nominal fees in seven cases, and only three fees of a remunerative amount. The total result is that no operations in my pi-actice, except those for vesico-vaginal fistula, have been so unremu- nerative. But leaving all this aside, and it really is hardly worth serious attention, let us discuss on purely scientific grounds the twenty-seven cases on my present list which might be classed under the head of oophorectomies by any one caring to con- tinue the use of this word. At once I say that at least twelve, and perhaps fifteen cases, are out of court, for in all of them the ovaries were cystic, or varying in size from a pigeon's egg to a cocoa nut; and I do not know where to draw the line between a small cystic ovary and an ovarian tumour; and I do not care to follow Professor Hegar's example and make a conventional distinction. Here I must mention one of the results of this new practice](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b2146702x_0018.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
