The ophthalmologists of to-day fear nothing inside nor outside the eye. Cross eyes are straightened, cataracts removed, eyeballs taken out and glass eyes inserted.
This article would be incomplete, were not a few remarks directed toward the trained nurse.
The first training school for nurses in America was established in connection with the Lying-in Charity Hospital of Philadelphia in 1828. This school, still in existence, thus has the honor of being the oldest in this country, and is antedated by only one abroad.
The generally recognized profession for women, that of the trained nurse, is practically of recent development. Twenty-five years ago the training school connected with the Bellevue Hospital, New York, graduated a class of five nurses. This was a marked departure in the medical history of this country. Since then the demand for the trained nurse has been great, and no hospital is complete without such a training school.
The progress of medicine in the nineteenth century has been far more rapid, creditable, and momentous than during any like period of the past. This is true not only in the United States, but in every civilized country. Its entire scope, meaning, and purpose have undergone changes equivalent to revolution. Antique superstitions, idle theories, foolish speculations, absurd practices, the ridiculous jealousies and incriminations of opposing schools, have been largely eliminated. Medical institutions are upon the loftiest plane in their history. Teachers are better endowed than ever before. Periods of scholastic preparation have been lengthened and curriculums enlarged, thus securing for the fields of practice a higher mental equipment and more conscionable devotion to duty. Never before have the auxiliary and material agencies been turned to so frequent and preventive account. Electricity, the microscope, anæsthesia, antisepsis, laboratory experiment, hospital opportunities, etc., are ever constant inspirations to skilled treatment and fresh researches. As the grand army of humanitarian workers was never so large as at the end of the century, so it was never better fortified for attack upon the enemies of health, fuller of enthusiasm or more deeply established in the public confidence. One may not, as yet, assert that medicine is ridding itself of empiricism with a satisfactory degree of rapidity, or that it has arrived at the stage of an exact science, but it surely has approached such a stage as nearly as conditions will allow.
EVOLUTION OF THE RAILWAY
By E. E. RUSSELL TRATMAN, C.E.,
Assistant Editor of “Engineering News,” Chicago.
The railway as a means of rapid transportation and general intercommunication is one of the most important factors in the development of modern commerce and civilization, and, after reviewing what it has done and become in the nineteenth century, one cannot help wishing for the opportunity to review the railway wonders of the twentieth century.
While the history of the railway dates back far beyond the nineteenth century, yet the railway, as we know it to-day, is essentially a product of this century. It dates, in fact, from England in 1830, when the Liverpool & Manchester Railway, 31 miles long, was opened, and was operated from the beginning by steam locomotives. The Stockton & Darlington Railway, 37 miles, was opened in 1825, but this line was intended only for private coal traffic, while the other line was built for general passenger and freight service, and for the use and benefit of the public.