Another class of experiments is carried on by surgeons to develop dexterity before they attempt operations on man. Such experiments are usually carried out on dogs. The animals are invariably under complete anesthesia and usually they are killed by added ether at the end of the experiment.
Does this dog look unhappy? Ten years ago Buster had an operation performed on the stomach; the results have been of aid in the study of digestion. Buster has not suffered thereby, and she has saved much suffering to others. She is receiving a visit from the author.
Recently I attended the clinic of a throat specialist in the east. I saw child after child wheeled into the amphitheatre and relieved, usually in a few moments, of foreign bodies that they had sucked into the windpipe and that a few years ago would in many cases have caused death, either directly or as the result of a dangerous operation. So dextrous is this man that his little patients do not need any anesthetic. After his work was done I had a talk with him, and he told me that the technic of these operations had been worked out with great care on dogs that were always under an anesthetic. He also told me that by the use of two dogs he had trained fifty other men to do similar work.
This is Whitey, about eight months after the complete removal of the parathyroid glands. These glands are quite often partly and accidentally removed during operations on the thyroid gland in man, with alarming and sometimes fatal results. Following complete removal of the parathyroid glands, carnivorous animals, including man, die within from four to six days. As a result of experimental work on this dog and other animals, three effective curative measures have been developed, which indefinitely preserve the life of such animals in normal health. Two persons are known to have been saved and several others have been rendered free from symptoms as a result of this study.
III
In the Civil War if a man was shot through the bowels, he was doomed to death; the surgeons hardly dared to open the abdomen and if they did they didn’t know how to join the ends of the bowel so that it would not leak. Of course the slightest leak meant infection and death. Then came along an experimenter who etherized about thirty dogs, shot them through the bowels, and practiced joining bowel ends until he could make a perfect joint. It is safe to say that in the World War the lives of thousands of men were saved as a result of that series of experiments.
