HEROES OF SURGERY

Manawatu Standard, Volume LV, Issue 254, 24 September 1935, Page 8

HEROES OF SURGERY

In delivering the first Hamilton Russell Memorial lecture at the B.M.A. Conference in Melbourne, Professor E. AV. Hey Groves, Professor of Surgery at the Belfast University, desscribed the lives of three great heroes, who had made the present science of surgery possible—Hunter, Lister and Roentgen. “John Hunter is our patron saint, as it were, in your sister college in London,” Professor Hey Groves said. “He it was above all others who raised surgery from an Empirical cult to a reasoned science. Yet lie himself was iinmannered, uncouth, and unlearned. A large amount of what he wrote was unintelligible, and much of it untrue. His greatness lay in the lofty character of the ideals which he pursued, and the passionate earnestness of his pursuit. His zeal for experimental work „was such that he actually made himself the object of bis greatest experiment, which succeeded so well as to inoculate him with the disease which caused his own death. Lister was a hero of ouite another type, gentle, courteous and modest.' lie took up the trail of scientific research which Hunter had blazed before him, and pursued it until be bad discovered tlie greatest thing in modern surgery, the nature of septic infection and means of its prevention

One more giant of the past, Wilhelm Konrad Roentgen, died only 12 years ago. “I can remember well the announcement of his discovery of X-rays just after I had graduated,” Professor Hev Groves said. -“It was held by manv that clinical skill which needed this new-fangled invention as an aid was at fault, but now the magic rays from Wurtzburg have come to enlighten not only the bone surgeon, but also the worker in every other department of medicine.”