Record of the events and work which led to the formation of that society by the amalgamation of the leading medical societies of London with the Royal Medical and Chirurgical Society : being extracts from the Medico-Chirurgical Transactions, 1905-1907 / Royal Society of Medicine.
- Royal Society of Medicine
- Date:
- 1914
Licence: In copyright
Credit: Record of the events and work which led to the formation of that society by the amalgamation of the leading medical societies of London with the Royal Medical and Chirurgical Society : being extracts from the Medico-Chirurgical Transactions, 1905-1907 / Royal Society of Medicine. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.
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![in 1838, that Bostock read his paper on the clinical examination of the urine and so initiated an important development of clinical pathology. Dr. Webster's ]iaper, in 1843, on the brutal treatment of the insane then prevailing was the forerunner of the gentler and more humane methods which Oonolly so nobly advocated. The paper by Hamilton Roe and Thompson, in 1885, on Paracen- tesis for Empyema (preceded hj 14 years by a single case recorded by Dobson), was the beginning of a great advance in thoracic therapeutics. Then we have John Hutchinson on the Spirometer, John Marshall on the Galvano-Cautery, Golding-Bird and Hilton on an Operation for Internal Strangulation in 1846-47, Kirkes on the Detachment of Fibrinous Clots from the Interior of the Heart and their Mixture with the Circulating Fluid, and Spencer Wells's first five cases of Ovariotomy a year or two later. These are amongst the more suggestive of the papers in the first half of the century, every one of which may be said to herald great future achievements in Medicine. The latter half of the century has also had its epoch-making papers. But in the fifty years between 1840 and 1890 there were four great events in medicine which would mark out for distinction any century—viz. Marshall Hall's exposition of the reflex function of the nervous system; the discovery of a safe angesthesia ; the discovery and acceptance of the antiseptic system in surgery; and the growing recognition of the action of bacteria in the etiology and pathology of the acute specific diseases. These four great advance- ments in medical science crowded into the short space of fifty years have an interdependence that might form the subject of an interesting discourse, upon which, howevei^, I have no intention to enter. This Society has had some- thing to do with them all, and they have permeated and dominated most of its later and most brilliant records. Without angesthesia, in the absence of antiseptic methods or their more recent aseptic developments, and without a knowledge of bacteriology, no advance in visceral or joint surgery, was possible, no further steps for the prevention](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21471605_0047.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
