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

Date:
1882
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

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

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    It may give you a nearer and clearer perception of such barbarities, if I quote from a letter with which I have been favoured by our venerable brother ^Ir. Tliomas Taylor, whose presence amongst us to-day is, I am sure, matter of general congratulation. ]\Ir. Taylor, a pupil of Abernethy, had an uncle, his namesake, who was appointed apothecary to our G-eneral Hospital in 1785. From him he often heard of the horrors of amputation scenes,—dressers watching by the patient day and night, with buttons of lint dipped in flour on a plate, ready for application to any bleeding point that might appear. Keflect on such a scene, and on the experiences of Petit^ and Bromfield, as surgical realities in the second half of the last century. Happily a brighter era was dawning. Constituted under the leadership of Lapeyronie in 1731, the French surgical academicians were the chief glory and mainstay of scientific Surgery in the pre-Hunterian epoch. It is of their memoirs that Sir Benjamin Brodie said “ There is no richer mine of surgical knowledge than that which is contained in the memoirs of the French Academy of Surgery.”* To quote very briefly from their preface “ There are two sources whence flow the truths which can enrich our art, clinical observation and experimental physics. . . The plan which the Academy proposes to itself is to raise Surgery on the basis of clinical observation, physical researches, and experiments.”! The Academy's memoirs and collection of prizes are re- plete with evidence of the importance they attached to, and the increase of knowledge derived from, experiments on living *On the studies required for the medical profession, or lectures illustrative of various sub- jects in pathology and surgery, by Sir B. Brodie, London, 184(5. P. 26. tMemoires de I’Acad^mie Royale de Chirurgie, Svo. ed., Paris, 1774. Tome ler, p.p. 10, 11 and xlv.