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

  • Gamgee, Sampson, 1828-1886.
Date:
1882
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

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

    27/36 (page 25)
    The painless sleep produced, we apply the taxis ; that failing, we divide the skin and subjacent structures, and in the absence of special contra-indications, strive to reduce without opening the sac. We may still fail, open the sac and fail again. Then gently turn out the contents, and within a mass of omentum find a knuckle of blue red bowel. Most carefully, the stricture is divided, the contents returned, and the patient allowed to wake, perhaps to ask for the first question, “ when are you going to begin ? ” and to be told in reply that all is safely over ; and to be assured of recovery, which, all cutting surgical operations included, surgeons can now guarantee with an average mortality of about two per cent. If anyone try to conceive the thousands upon thousands of human lives saved by surgical operation, he must re¬ member that the computation is not one of simple addition. An unknown quantity has to be discovered, and allowed for ; the hundreds and hundreds of lives that are shortened by the surgeon’s knife. Where is the operator of large ex¬ perience who cannot recall lives that, but for his intervention, might have been prolonged for months or years ? Once a disease is diagnosed, which in all human probability must prove fatal if left to its course, and which internal remedies cannot relieve, if a chance of complete recovery be held out by the surgeon, how anxious for it, in the majority of in¬ stances, are patients and friends. Every precaution is taken, every wise counsel sought, all possible skill employed, and yet how often within a few hours the undertaker follows the surgeon. Is not that an awful yet inevitable human vivisection ? How many such results have been saved by the experience acquired in the vivisection of brutes ?