ADVANCE, OF SURGERY.

Auckland Star, Volume LXII, Issue 289, 7 December 1931, Page 3

ADVANCE, OF SURGERY.

CURES WITHOUT MUTILATION. NEW ERA PREDICTED. A new era in the treatment of cancer in which as far as possible the use of the knife will be avoided and much more extensive use will be made of agents such as radium and X-rays to effect cures without mutilation was predicted by the president of the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons (Sir Henry New-land) when delivering the Halford oration at the Australian Institute of Anatomy at Canberra recently. The oration, which was founded by the family of the late Professor G. B. Halford, who established the first medical school in the Southern Hemisphere, that at Melbourne, is given annually. Sir Henry Newland took as his subject, "Surgery in Australia: Some Contrasts and Comparisons." He pointed out that in Australia the most modern surgical methods and the rude surgery of the stone age were practised simultaneously. When a man was shot through the heart, this, to the lay mind, meant that he was as good as dead. Yet surgery had so advanced that the modern conical bullet had been removed from both the right and the left heart cavities and the patients had recovered. Similarly brilliant results had been obtained in lung surgery. The surgeon's knife ; an electrical one, had also intruded into the' deepest recesses of the human brain. The electric loop had made possible the removal of certain brain tumours which a few years previously had been considered inoperable. However, the present tendency to restrict the extent of surgical intervention was good, for the safety and case with which the surgeon had learned to remove organs, or large portions of them, had sometimes led to the adoption of too radical an outlook.

Sir Henry said the future surgical treatment of cancer would not be by the old and mutilating methods of the knife. Radium and the deep X-ray were the chief weapons in the attack on the stronghold of cancer. In those inner recesses of the body where it had been foretold that the knife could never enter, the skilful hand of the surgeon entrenched radium. To-day, thanks to radium, cures came without mutilation, and man remained as he had been created.