MARVELLOUS FEATS OF EARLY SURGEONS

Star (Christchurch), Issue 19258, 20 December 1930, Page 27 (Supplement)

MARVELLOUS FEATS OF EARLY SURGEONS

PLASTIC SURGERY USED A HUNDRED YEARS AGO. In tlie cornerstone of a new building designed as the home of the New York Hospital for a life of “not less than 100 years,” there was placed recently not only an account of the accomplishments in medicine and surgery to-day but also a record of the work of the hospital's surgeons a century ago. This record of the past reveals the early surgeons of New York as men of remarkable ability, many of whose skilful operations would do credit to modern surgeons. It was compiled as a book by Doctors Eugene H. Pool and Frank J. McGowan, of the present hospital staff, from a recently-discovered register of cases brought to the hospital in the period from 1808 to 1833. Plastic Surgery Used in 1832. Plastic surgery appeared as a new and astonishing development during the World War. The record in the cornerstone, however, will reveal to some future generation that in 1832 doctors Valentine Mott and John Kearny Rodgers constructed a new face for Rufus Woollard, a North Carolina farmer, from the tissue of his own neck. He was discharged with the “symmetry of his countenance fully restored.” Woollard’s case was but one of many surprising examples of the early surgical triumphs at the hospital, which show that its brilliant surgeons were performing feats that often rivalled the work of the best modern surgeons, despite the tremendous handicaps of that day. Surgeons Lacked Facilities. Lacking almost every facility that surgery now regards as indispensable, the cases reveal, the men of 100 years ago had to place their main trust in their native ability. They had no X-ray with which to see conditions within the human body; no stethoscopes with which to hear indications of internal disorder. They even lacked thermometers. It was not until 1798 that Dr. Valentine, Seaman organised at the New York Hospital the first regular school for trained nurses, and not until many years later that nurses were regularly available to aid in treatment. Except for th» use of wines and liquors to moisten dressings, their were no antiseptics, and the bateriological cause of infection were unknown. Anaesthetics Unknown. Most trying of all, from the standpoint both of patient and surgeon, was the fact that there were no anaesthites. New Yorkers of a century ago were a rugged lot, if the reports of the old surgeons are any indication. Although the surgeons spoke sternly of intemperance, wines and liquors held a prominent place in their pharmacopoeia. Delirium tremens was often a complicating feature in surgical cases. There was one instance in which the patient insisted on getting out c* bed and walking around on a broken leg. Recourse was had to the strait-jacket and, finally, a pint of brandy a day was perscribed, with the following results:— “By the continuance of this last prescription for'two days he was perfectly restored to his Eenses, a change so sudden and unexpected as to astonish all who saw him.” Amputation Often Employed. Early surgery in New York, the case reports show, bore many points of similarity to that of surgery on a modern battlefield. In both instances the danger of infection was high, necessitating amputation in cases where peace-tjme surgery of to-day would save the arm or the leg. Bad fractures were a frequent cause of amputation. When Dr. Samuel Bard brought about the founding of the New York Hospital in 1771, there was but one other hospital in America, the Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia. It is not surprising, therefore, that the institution was soon able to attract to its staff leading surgeons of the land. Valentine Seaman, attending surgeon of the New York Hospital from 1796 to 1817, introduced vaccination in W 99, one year after its discovery in England by Jenner. A century before Walter Reed and his associates demonstrated that yellow fever was transmitted by a mosquito rather than by contagion, Seaman supported the contention that the disease was not contagious. Valentine Mott, perhaps the most famous of all New York surgeons, succeeded Seaman as an attending surgeon at the New York Hospital. He was elected to the chair of surgery in Columbia College at the age of twentyfour and, in 1840, became Professor of Surgery and the first president of the Medical Faculty in New York University. Anatomy Taught in 1792. Wright Post, attending surgeon from 1792 to 1821, was not only a master of vascular surgery but one of the most brilliant teachers of anatomy of his day, having begun lectures in the New York Hospital in 1792. Alexander H. Stevens, one of his contemporaries, introduced into the hospital the practice of clinical instruction both at the bedside and in the operating room, which is one of the chief factors of differentiation between modern medical education and the almost purely didactic methods of the past.