TALKS ON HEALTH

Greymouth Evening Star, 17 March 1934, Page 3

TALKS ON HEALTH

(By a Family Doctor.)

SURGERY PAST AND PRESENT

I think I will tell you a story this week. I go to my dispensary q.pd see my patients, and I am just as sjck of talking about illness as you are of hearing me talk. Besides, I make no impression. Tlie stale old round is nauseating sometimes. By the time I have seen twenty people with indigestion and bad teeth (and it is the same thing every day), when I have told anaemic girls not to drink so much tea and tried to teach stuffy men and women the value of fresh air, I am so tired! Bother the people! If they want to keep their anaemia, their rickety children, their smelly homes, let them; what care I? I have a nice clean home because I like to have it so; they have a dirty home and they like it; so we are both pleased.

HOSPITALS EIGHTY YEARS AGO

Any way., this is the story. Somewhere about 70 or 80 years ago hospitals were not what they are now. The nurses were broken-down old charladies of the type of Mrs Gamp. Whatever else they had to do, there was one duty they never forgot, and that was to drink the whisky that was ordered for their patients. There were no flowers in the wards, no touches of sympathy, no bright pictures. All the patients looked ashy, miserable, and ill; most of them were dying, and nothing could he done to save them. Over the hospital doors might have been written. “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.!’ Amputations were very common in those days; to-day they are rare. Modern methods enable the surgeons to prevent or cure the festering processes, and the limbs are preserved. A hand or a foot, however badly damaged, is generally of more value than an artificial substitute.

THE SURGEON’S SPONGE

It - you had seen a surgeon going his rounds in those days you would have seen him wearing an old black coat begrimed with stains from his operations. When his black coat grew so shabby that his wife said she would not be seen walking with him unless he got a new coat, he would say, “Very well, dear; I will use this old one in the operating theatre.” The old coat was made to do service for weeks and weeks, and many a poor man must Have been infected by the accumulated dirt on the surgeon’s coat. Then, even a careful surgeon would go from case to case bathing the wounds with the same sponge. The ?ame old sponge mark you; so that if the wound of the first patient he dressed was infected with some foul organism, all the rest of the patients would be infected by the sponge. A SURGEON’S IDEA One day it suddenly struck a surgeon who was in deep despair about his own want of success, that when a man had a broken leg and the skin was unharmed, the broken leg healed up; when the skin was broken and an open wound was formed, the wound suppurated and the patient very likely died. It looked as though the skin had some protective effect. If so, the only thing the skin protected the bone from was the air, and it was a small step from thinking of the air to the dust that the air contained. So the surgeon thought he would keep the air as clean as possible and do all he could to avoid sullying the wound with floating dust. He knew that carbolic was a gdod cleanser, because he had found that if he put a. piece of meat in the air it went bad and smelt of putrefaction, but if he put some barbolic on the meat it remained unputrefied. So he rigged up in the operating theatre a spray that caused an artificial rain of watery solution to fall from the ceiling to the floor; this was fairly successful, but it poisoned some of the surgeons, and so another method had to be devised. THE WORK OF LISTER Experiments were carried out with different lotions, and slowly but surely a definite system was adopted of thorough surgical cleanliness. One interesting fact is worth recording. This work was done by Mr. Lister, after wards Lord Lister, in Scotland. The English surgeons of London and other places were very slow in adopting the new methods; they even pooh-poohed the new fantastic ideas. Lister knew the truth; he knew he could save his patients’ lives by the thousand; he knew how to convert hospitals from mere charnel-houses to real havens of hope and salvation for the sick and injured. He knew it all, and spent weary months in trying to ram his ideas into the thick skulls of his contemporaries. What Lister succeeded in doing for all mankind, I, in a very feeble way, am trying to do for those who read what I write.