ADVANCE OF SURGERY

Evening Star, Issue 20981, 21 December 1931, Page 12

ADVANCE OF SURGERY

KNIFE BECOMES BABER ADVANTAGES OF RADIUM 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 ert'ect cures without mutilation was predicted by the president of the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons (Sir Henry Newland) 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 Ins 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 ago were practised simultaneously. When a man was shot through the heart, this, to the i 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 right and left heart cavities and the patients had recovered. Similar brilliant .results had been ob* tained in lung surgery. The surgeon s knife, an electrical one, had also intraded into the deepest recesses of the human brain. , ~ The president of the Royal College of Surgeons in England (Lord Moymhan), continued Sir_ Henry Newland, had expressed the opinion that modern surgery had reached its limits. With much of that he agreed, but it seemed too much to expect that surgical craft and science would fail to malc3 tno advances in tho future that they had jnado aiready. Unforeseen technical advances in the collateral sciences in tho collateral sciences could orten be adopted for use in surgery. Ihe electric loop, for instance, liad made possible the removal of certain brain tumours which a few years previously had been considered inoperable. However, the present tendency ’o restrict the extent of surgical intervention was good, for the safety and ease 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 Newland said that greater attention should be paid to diseases in their early stages. The science and art of surgery should he based on a sound foundation of anatomy and physiology. 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 tho chief weapons in tho 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 ho had been created.