An address delivered before the Alumni Association of the College of Physicians and Surgeons in the City of New York, Medical Department of Columbia College : at the ninth annual meeting, March 15, 1867 / by Alfred C. Post.

  • Alfred Charles Post
Date:
1867
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: An address delivered before the Alumni Association of the College of Physicians and Surgeons in the City of New York, Medical Department of Columbia College : at the ninth annual meeting, March 15, 1867 / by Alfred C. Post. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University Libraries/Information Services, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University.

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    external surface of the body. The ocular inspection of the interior of the vagina, of the os uteri, and of the internal surface of the rectum, by means of the speculum, was unknown. The ophthalmoscope had not yet exposed to view the interior of the eye, and many of the diseases of that delicate and important organ were consequently unknown or very imperfectly under- stood. The otoscope was also unknown, and the morbid con- ditions of the meatus auditorius, and of the membrana tympani were not properly appreciated. The laryngoscope, the rhino- scope, and the endoscope, had not yet been introduced, and the data for judging of the diseased conditions of the larynx and trachea, the posterior nares and the urethra, were much less full and complete than they have become since the introduction of these valuable instruments. Sixty years ago, the practice of aus- cultation and percussion was almost unknown. Since that time, the sense of hearing has been brought into requisition as a most important means of diagnosis in affections of the heart and arteries, of the lungs, and of other organs. The Materia Medica has undergone great improvements, not only by the introduction of many new and valuable remedies, but also by the employment of more efficient and reliable prepara- tions of remedies which were previously in use. Among these im- proved preparations may be enumerated the vegetable alkaloids and their salts, and the fluid extracts. The Materia Medica of the present day is more simple, more definite, and more reliable than that of sixty years ago. But the greatest improvement of the Materia Medica has been the introduction of the class of anaesthetic vapors. The younger members of the profession, who cannot look back upon a period in their professional lives when the anaesthetic virtues of ether and chloroform were unknown, can scarcely conceive of the extent of the revolution in medical and surgical practice, occasioned by the introduction of these import- ant agents. They cannot look back, as the senior members of the profession can do, upon the overwhelming horror with which patients approached the operating table, and upon the screams of agony which were wrung from the sufferers, as the instruments of torture penetrated the living and sensitive tissues of their bodie>. Surgical operations have been in a great measure divested of their terrors by the introduction of that marvellous class of agents bv means of which the patient is promptly brought into a state of
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