THE WONDERS OF MODERN SURGERY.

Evening Post, Volume LXVIII, Issue 80, 1 October 1904, Page 13

THE WONDERS OF MODERN SURGERY.

A vivid description of the wonders of modern surgery by Mr. Harold Begbie appears in the August number of the Pall Mall Magazine. "One can think," says the writer, "of few situations in life so likely to throw the nerves out of gear as an unexpected development in the midst of a most delicate operation, but so -wonderfully trained is the modern surgeon, and so completely under control is his whole nervous organism, that he will sometimes follow out a new line of action without causing those about him to suspect that the original fclan has been abandoned. The reader will perceive that this steadiness of nerve and this superb adaptability of mind could hardly be possible without the discoveries of Simpson and Lister; and here we arrive at the chief factor in the romance of modern surgery. It is easy to be grateful for anesthesia, easy to realise the difference between the conscious and unconscious patient under the knife of the surgeon ; but the mercies of anaesthesia do not stop here. A more sensitive type of man can now become a surgeon, and the profession attracts a higher and nobler order ofmiad. Operations which would have appalled this type of man if he had been a surgeon a generation ago, and which would have seemed like a miracle to those ■wonderful Hindus with their hundred steel instruments, are now of daily, almost hourly, occurrence in the hospitals of London. "Thing for a moment of operations performed on the brain. Here,'' with scarcely any risk to the patient, the surgeon cuts through the densely resisting bone of the skull, makes a semilunar incision through the inner and softer membranes, and then lays bare that pulsating mass of matter which seems to some of us the instrument of the soul, and to otheijs the very soul itself. This alone is an act which makes one pause to admire the consummate skill and the fearless daring of the * surgeon ; but admiration become? swallowed up in a dumb amazement ancj a silent wonderment when one sees the surgeon take his knife, bend over thaij mind lying open before him like "a stopped watch, and 1 with a swift and unerring stroke remove a tumour from the very midst of it. How is it that the^ arm does not tremble, the hand does not shake, the finger does not swerve? A 1 deviation of the fraction of an inch, as the knife dros down in obedience to the" surgeon's will, and irreparable damage would be inflicted ; the heart would cease to beat, and the soul would no more be able to express itself on that ruined instrument."