I* 348 FAMOUS LIYING AMERICANS J orders. However, many diseases now prevalent will be rare or will have disappeared entirely. The curative side of medi- cine will grow but it will develop in a collective way, and pre- ventive medicine will be less wasteful of time and service than curative medicine is and has been. < The great use of the vastly improved service by physi- • cians in the future will be in increasing the efficiency of the human machine. The men of the next generation who find themselves incapacitated to some degree by some physical dis- ability, so far from being content to work at low efficiency, will demand that their medical servitors remedy the disability. f Much of this work will be surgical. Surgery of that type is known as surgery of election. For it, sickness is not the im- I r f t
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1 pelling cause. Death does not stare the patient in the face. ^ The operations are undergone because the parties are dissat- ^ isfied with their inefficiency. Knowing the possibilities by ^ reason of the state of the art, they elect to undergo the opera- 5 tions required. J The most recent surgical proposal made by Dr. Murphy is a group of methods for the restoration of the function of joints and the replacement of diseased and lost bones. In the olden days, John, crippled or lame, ambled through life as best he could. He was as efficient as a crippled man could be but still his efficiency was the efficiency of a crippled man. **l8 John a capable man ? ' ' the neighbor was asked. * * Oh, yes, as cripples go," he replied. John understood, but what could he dof He went to the surgeon for relief from his stiff hip or to have a new piece of bone put in to straighten his spine, but the surgeon declined to undertake the work. Why t The first essential — certain asepsis — could not be guaranteed. The years to come will witness a procession of people seek- ing the operating room as a means of increasing efficiency. The stiflF-limbed, the lame, and the hunchback are the forerun- ners of this procession. This group of operative procedures, in that they pioneer the field wherein the surgery of the fu- ture is to be chiefly developed, earn for the man who has de- veloped them the right to the regard of his fellows. There are those who say that operations on bones and joints
