Transactions (Volume 8) (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: SPECIAL SURGICAL TOPIC. I. SURGICAL FANATICISM. AY MORGAN VANCE, M.D., l.or l-v I I.I.K. KT. The title of this paper has been suggested to me by having noticed in my reading during the last several years some remarkable propositions in the line of surgical procedures. In fact, every now and then I have been astonished upon running across proposed surgery, on the face of it so barbarous as to grate on my mind and leave the impression that possibly, in the wonderful advances of the last decade particularly, some of us are being carried away by too much enthusiasm?in other words, are becoming more or less fanatical; in many instances losing sight of the first law controlling surgery, the welfare of the patient. Several of the procedures, recognized and described both in journal and text book, fall under this class. For instance, the operation known as Kraske's, the resection of more or less of the sacrum to make more accessible growths of rectum or uterus. I remember well the first time I heard this operation described. It was at the meeting several years ago of the American Society of Gynecologists and Obstetricians in New York, and as a guest I was called on to discuss the paper. The author. Doctor Montgomery, of Philadelphia, reported several cases. 1 then said that as a procedure to be done by the rank and file of surgeons generally, I thought it unjustifiable. That as Doctor Montgomery was surrounded by all hospital conveniences and everything else to aid him in overcoming shock and combating other complications, one might see a Justification for such work occasionally. Only recently I have heard of an enthusiastic post-graduate man returning to his clientele filled with the desire to shine as a great surgeon; among his first cases were three, according to h...