On improvements recently made in the treatment of stricture of the urethra : being a supplement to A treatise on stricture and stone / by James Arnott.

  • Arnott, James Moncrieff, 1794-1885.
Date:
1856
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On improvements recently made in the treatment of stricture of the urethra : being a supplement to A treatise on stricture and stone / by James Arnott. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    more of these should have to the others in any particular case, and sufficient ingenuity to modify them according to circumstances. For, cases of stricture are much diversified, and hardly one occurs that does not require some peculiarity of treatment. Simplicity and uniformity in the management of this disease have been advocated by some writers who have not reflected on this diversity, and such a system is supposed to have been countenanced by the late Mr Liston. But although this able surgeon used few instruments in his prac- tice, he displayed his ingenuity by supplying the want with unexpected substitutes, as in using his forefinger in lieu of a dilator for the extraction of stone, and when he arrested a dangerous hsemorrhage during an operation by plugging the artery with a splinter of wood cut with his scalpel from the operating table. He had too much common sense to think that the mechanical art of surgery was not to be benefited by having recourse to mechanical science; and perhaps the most valuable contribution he made to this art consists of his addi- tions to its armamentarium. On no point in surgery has there been more bad reasoning than on that of simplicity and complexness in surgical in- struments. Complexness is objectionable when it is un- necessary, as, for example, in the trepanning instruments represented in the old work of Heister; but there are many purposes which cannot be accomplished without complicate apparatus, and some of the greatest triumphs in surgery are due to the substitution of these for simpler expedients. To this we owe the modern inventions of lithotrity, and the cure of aneurism by compression. In lieu of the simple file with which Colonel Martin is said to have reduced the stone in his bladder, the “ lithotrite ” has been devised; and for the simple tourniquet originally used in aneurism, the
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