SURGICAL WORK ELIMINATED

Timaru Herald, Volume CLVIII, Issue 23324, 6 October 1945, Page 5

SURGICAL WORK ELIMINATED

Wider Use Of Penicillin * LONDON. October 4. “I feel like a man singing at his own graveside,” said Dr. Dickson Wright, famous surgeon of St. Mary’s Hospital, Paddington, referring to the use of penicillin once it is made available to the general

public. “The use of penicillin is going to deprive us of a great deal of our surgical work,” said Dr. Wright. “I have seen wiped out at one stroke a lot of operations I have been performing There will be no more carbuncles, boils, childbed fever or septic pneumonia. Pneumonia will in future be handled so easily that there will be no chance of complication. Social diseases. which have exercised the minds of politicians so much, Will no longer be a problem. “Sir Alexander Fleming, by the discovery of penicillin, will have done more people in the medical profession out of a job than anv other person at any time.” said Dr. Wright. “He discovered a cure for scores of diseases, because penicillin can be abolied to everything—obstetrics, surgery and medicine.”

Dr. Wrieht added that efforts were being made to see if penicillin could be given bv the mouth instead of injection. Experiments were being made with suuar-coated pills, lozenges and snuff It was recently found possible to give ppn’riWn in the fnrm of a very fine spray tbrmivh the month.