try alone. Is this cruelty? Let Norfolk, and Memphis, and Pensacola, and New Orleans answer.
We are all familiar now with the numerous deaths from eating pork infested with trichina. While I was in Berlin, in 1865-'66, a terrible epidemic of the then new disease broke out at Hedersleben, a small town in Prussian Saxony. I well remember with what zeal Virchow and his assistants immediately investigated the disease, inoculated animals with the parasitic worm, studied its natural history, found out that heat killed it, and to-day, as a result of these and other experiments, we all know how to avert its dangers by proper cooking, or to avoid it altogether by the microscope. The value of these experiments, both to human life and to commerce, you know even from the daily papers.
You will find it difficult to make the non-medical public understand—nay, you yourselves as yet hardly understand—the enormous advance in medicine and surgery brought about by recent researches on inflammation, and by the use of antiseptics. My own professional life only covers twenty-three years, yet in that time I have seen our knowledge of inflammation wholly changed, and the practice of surgery so revolutionized that what would have been impossible audacity in 1862 has become ordinary practice in 1885.
It would seem that so old a process as inflammation would long ago have been known through and through, and that nothing new could be adduced. In 1851, however, Claude-Bernard, by a slight operation, divided the sympathetic nerve in a rabbit's neck and showed its influence on the caliber of the blood-vessels. In 1858 Virchow published his "Cellular Pathology." In 1867 Cohnheim (Virchow's "Archiv") published his studies on the part that the blood-cells played in inflammation as shown in the frog, followed by further papers by Dr. Norris, of this city, Strieker, Von Recklinghausen, Waldeyer, and many others. Already in my lectures I have pointed out to you in detail the advances made by these studies, both in theory and practice. They have brought about an entire reinvestigation of disease, and given us wholly new knowledge as to abscesses, ulceration, gangrene, the organization of clots in wounds, and after operations and ligature of blood-vessels for aneurism, as to thrombosis, and embolism, and paralysis, and apoplexy, and a score of other diseases through the diagnosis and treatment of which now runs the silver thread of knowledge instead of ignorance.
With this the brilliant results of the antiseptic system have joined to give us a new surgery. Sir Joseph Lister, to whom we chiefly owe this knowledge, has done more to save human life and diminish human suffering than any other man of the last fifty years. Had he only made practicable the use of animal ligatures, it would have been an untold boon, the value of which can only be appreciated by doctors; but he has done far more, he has founded a new system of surgery.
