Doctors Versus Folks

WIDE-RANGING COLLECTION OF ESSAYS ON EARLY 20TH CENTURY AMERICAN SURGERY AND SOCIETY BY INNOVATIVE DISCIPLE OF JOSEPH LISTER--SIGNED BY THE AUTHOR.

13x21 cm green cloth boards, gilt title to cover and spine, withdrawn Boston Medical Library bookplate front paste-down, inscribed and signed on front flyleaf, John S. Clark with the kind regards of Robert T. Morris 616 Madison Ave, New York, Oct 31st 1917. [x], photographic frontis, 365 pp, residue from library sticker removal from spine and back cover, corners worn, spine ends frayed, gilt titles bright, binding tight, pages crisp and unmarked, very good minus in custom archival mylar cover.

Contents: Retrospection; Technical Wrath; Surprising Facts; Great Surgeons; The Doctor's Social Position; Tempora Mutantur; Occasional Operators; Vaccination; Women Physicians; Psychology; Actual Practice; Mistakes; Early Cases; Friedmann Fee Splitting; American College of Surgeons; Specialists; Investment; Sectarians; Osteopathy; Innovators; Self-Prescribing; Publicity; Vivisection; Federal Department of Health; Press Notices of a Book; Fourth Era of Surgery; Germicides; New Doctrines; Microbes Again; Organic Defense; Accident; Ideal Professional Life.

ROBERT TUTTLE MORRIS (1857-1945) was an American surgeon and writer. His father was a lawyer, probate judge and Governor of Connecticut, and his mother Eugenia was an author. While at high school in New Haven he planned to go on to the college course in biology organised by Dr. Burt G. Wilder at Cornell. This one was the first pre-medical course of the country. In 1880 he was admitted to the College of Physicians and Surgeons of New York and graduated in 1882. Then he went up for examination for position on the Bellevue Hospital staff and he eventually got into the Fourth Surgical Division, so he spent a two-year internship there. At that time the Bellevue Hospital was the largest general hospital in the country. After his internship he studied in various surgical European clinics. While visiting Europe, he met Lister in London in 1884, and was one of the first to introduce Lister's teachings about surgical hygiene in the United States. In the end of the 1880s he had decided to make his work wholly surgical. Just around 1890 surgery started to be split up into its various specialties. The post-graduate Robert was then fascinated by surgical experimental work. His general practice had included nearly every type of service, and on the whole, his knowledge and results were fine. But in order to be a good doctor, it is important to develop skills and craftsmanship that only the experiences of specialization could give. After internship he settled at first in Albany, then moved to New York and began teaching at the New York Post-Graduate Medical School in 1889. He was given a position as instructor in surgery. This led step by step to a full professorship. He became a professor of surgery in 1898, a position he held until 1917. In the course of his experimental work he had elaborated new techniques and methods, which happened to be useful, and later on adopted by other surgeons. Morris had invented a sort of artificial synovial fluid. Made out by a mixture of boroglyceride, glycerine and normal saline solution, it resulted to be antiseptic and hygroscopic, so that it had a tendency to draw serous fluids towards itself. The consequences of all of its specific characteristics were that when injected into a joint, this fluid resisted absorption longer that an oil could. And these properties were particularly useful in cases of painful joints (especially those one of knee and shoulder). Then with Lister and Pasteur discoveries there it came the third era, characterized by the consciousness that the microbe had to be consider bigger than the man (In the First and Second Eras of surgery man was bigger than the microbe; in the Third Era the microbe was bigger than the man). But still, using Morris' own words, incisions suitable for killing bears were being applied to weak patients and also surgeons made multiple incisions for purpose of drainage and these also caused shock. He made up a method consisting in wound repairing through the agency of a moist blood clot, which became known and adopted in the world over as Schede method. Dr. Max Schede was indeed the one who decided to carry out this method in a number of different cases, after seeing Morris' demonstration, and he finally published a report upon this plan of procedure in the Deutzsche Medizinische Wochenschrift, 1886. Morris made some experimenting with grafting of ovaries in rabbits. In his notes he recorded a frequent trouble in the effort to make one set of rabbits immune to blood serum of another set of rabbits. The main issue was that tissue of any sort taken from one individual and planted in another is physiologically a stranger. The subject of gland grafting engaged his interest in the Nineties. He also noticed that ovarian grafting was so much more frequently possible than testis grafting, first of all because of the number of women donors, which he reported were much more ready than men to sacrifice a solid organ. He performed the first human ovarian grafting in 1895. and so he published the same year a presentation of his idea of gland grafting, description of technique and a report upon cases. And in May 1906 he published a great report of the birth of a living child after heteroplastic ovarian grafting in the New York Medical Record. After this report, he received many letters from women who had lost their ovaries and wished to have a gland grafting.

Product Info

Publisher: Doubleday Page & Co.

Year: 1916

Type: Used

Binding: Softcover

First Edition

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