A multitude of strange remedies are prescribed for Cancer. When Lord Metcalfe, the Governor of Canada, was beset with this cruel disease, Mr. Kaye, his biographer, tells us: “One correspondent recommended Mesmerism, which had cured Miss Martineau; another Hydropathy, at the pure springs of Malvern; a third, an application of the common dock-leaf; a fourth, an infusion of couch-grass; a fifth, the baths of Docherte, near Vienna; a sixth, the volcanic hot-springs of Karlsbad; a seventh, a wonderful plaster made of rose-leaves, olive-oil, and turnip-juice; an eighth, a plaster and powder, in which some part of a young frog was a principal ingredient; a ninth, a mixture of copperas and vinegar; a tenth, an application of pure ox-gall; an eleventh, a mixture of Florence oil and red precipitate; whilst a twelfth was certain of the good effects of Homœopathy, which cured Charlotte Elizabeth. Besides these varied remedies, many men and women with infallible recipes, or certain modes of treatment, were recommended by themselves and others. Learned Italian professors, mysterious American women, erudite Germans, and obscure Irish quacks—all had cured cancers of twenty years’ standing, and all were pressing, or pressed forward, to operate on Lord Metcalfe.”
Improved Surgery.
The basis, and no small portion of the superstructure, of scientific surgery, was laid by the famous Ambroise Paré, who possessed the rare gift of seeing things as they were, and not as his preconceived notions would have them to be. Sharing the common belief that gunshot wounds were, by their nature, poisonous, he used to treat them with boiling oil; but having failed once to apply the usual remedy, he was surprised to find that his patients were much the better for the omission. Thereupon, he renounced the ordinary practice, and from that time gunshot wounds have received a more rational treatment. Paré was the first to revive the practice known to the Arabians of stopping the flow of blood from arteries by tying them. The French Faculty of Medicine ridiculed the innovation as the system of hanging life upon a thread, and declared its preference for the use of boiling pitch which had stood the test of so many centuries; but wounded persons could not be brought to see the force of such reasoning. Anatomy was prosecuted with great assiduity and precision of detail throughout the whole of the sixteenth century, and the way was cleared for Harvey’s grand discovery, which he first publicly taught in 1619.
John Hunter introduced what is probably the most capital Improvement in Surgery ever effected by a single man;—namely, the practice in aneurism of tying the artery at a distance from the seat of disease. This one suggestion has saved thousands of lives; and both the suggestion, and the first successful execution of it, are entirely owing to John Hunter, who, if he had done nothing else, would on this account alone have a right to be classed among the principal benefactors of mankind.
Restoration of a Fractured Leg.
M. Flourens has communicated to the Paris Academy of Sciences a letter from Dr. Mottet, giving an account of the Restoration of a Fractured Leg under circumstances of peculiar difficulty. The fracture had been occasioned by a fall of stones on the limb; it was complex, and such that amputation presented peculiar difficulties; still, notwithstanding gangrene and other untoward circumstances, the fracture, being reduced, was kept in its normal position by a peculiar apparatus for the space of a year, at the end of which time the bone was completely regenerated, and the limb perfectly cured without any diminution in length.
The original “Dr. Sangrado.”
Thousands may have enjoyed the humour of Gil Blas without suspecting that the genius of Dr. Sangrado had any living prototype. Yet such was Botal, who revolutionized the practice of medicine by a freedom of bleeding that was quite unprecedented. He bled largely and repeatedly, both young and old, male and female, in all diseases, whether low in type or acute. “The young he bled freely, on account of the rapid reproduction of blood in youth; the old, because he saw in the practice a conduciveness to rejuvenescence. He bled freely in low and wasting diseases, even of a malignant nature, because a richer and better blood was formed; in dysentery, because he recognised in it an affinity to inflammation of the lungs, in which all physicians bled; in all forms of flatulency, because of its power to relieve obstructions; in short, he had a reason for bleeding in every special distemper, and when reproached for the indiscriminate routine of practice, he argued that the more water you draw from a well the purer and better is that which filters in. From him originated the system of bleeding in pregnancy, which is continued to this day.” Botal was a man of happy despatch, like Van Helmont, under whose hands, as his biographer relates, “the sick never languished long, being always killed or cured in three days.” Botal’s patients were probably more often killed than cured; but they did not die in vain, for his practice set medical men observing and thinking, so that good came of it in the end—a great consolation for his victims, could they have foreseen it.—Spectator newspaper.