The influence of vivisection on human surgery / by Sampson Gamgee.

  • Sampson Gamgee
Date:
1882
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The influence of vivisection on human surgery / by Sampson Gamgee. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    state the result. Death from hemorrhage is now so rare, that I have only lost one patient from it in thirty years hospital and private practice, and many surgeons can doubtless relate a similar experience. To what have our patients owed their safety ? Recall the. state of things a century ago. Empiricism had had unbroken sway for ages, and countless human beings had bled to death, and suffered martyrdom, by the application of vitriol and the red hot iron, for the arrest of hemorrhage. But the secrets of nature O were only discovered by the experimentalists, step by step, scalpel in hand. Living animals of all kinds were operated upon before the arrest of hemorrhage became a matter of quasi-mathematical certainty, and before the ablest men could attack the great arteries with success. Vitally important as were the researches on living animals whence flowed the knowledge of blood pressure and velocity, —matters of the first importance to the surgeon—I am precluded entering upon them as they lie outside my immediate object of practical surgical illustration. Within it however, are the researches on blood transfusion, initiated in the second half of the 17th century by Dr. Lower, of Oxford, and the Honourable Robert Boyle.* They proved by vivisection before the Royal Society, what had indeed been imperfectly known to the Ancients, that an animal dying from loss of blood, may be revived by the transfusion of blood into its vessels from another animal. The practice had chequered success; and it was only after further appeal to vivisection, that faith in it was so far restored as to warrant new trials in the human subject. In evidence of the manner in which the process of trans¬ fusion was revived, allow me to quote from Dr. James ^Philosophical Transactions of the Roj al Society of London. Abridged Edition. London, 1829. Vol. 1, p. 128.
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