It can not be claimed, of course, as to all this wonderful history of abdominal surgery—and remember that in 1862, when I was a medical student, I heard ovariotomists denounced from a professor's chair as murderers!—that experiments upon animals have done the whole work. No one man, no one series of experiments has sufficed, and experiment alone would not have done it. But had such experiments not been made on animals, as to the peritonæum, the pedicle, the sutures, the ligatures, etc., we should be far behind where we now are, and still be ignorantly sacrificing human life and causing human suffering.
But to return to America. The first condition to successful treatment is an accurate knowledge of what any disease is—its cause and its course—then we may guide it, and in due time, it may be, cure it.
Before Dr. H. C. Wood's[1] accurate experiments on the effects of heat on animals, the nature and effects of sunstroke were almost matters of mere conjecture. Every one had his own theory, and the treatment was equally varied. Even the heat-effects of fever itself—the commonest of all symptoms of disease were ill understood. Wood exposed animals to temperatures of 120° to 130° Fahr. and studied the effects. These experiments have often been alluded to as "baking animals alive." You will note that the heat was no greater than that to which laborers are frequently exposed in our hot summer-days, when working in the sun or in many industrial works. His experiments showed that the effects of sunstroke—or, as he happily termed it, Thermic or heat fever, a scientific name now widely adopted—were solely due to the heat, death following from coagulation of the muscular structure of the heart, or by its effects on the brain. They explained also many of the phenomena of ordinary fever as the result of heat alone. They have established the rational and now generally adopted treatment of sunstroke by reduction of the body-temperature; and the same method is now beginning to be appreciated and employed in ordinary fever.[2]
The same observer, with Dr. Formad, has made important experiments on the nature of diphtheria, and when we learn, as we probably soon shall, how to deal with the microscopic forms of life which seem to be its cause, it will not be too much to hope that we may be able to cope far more successfully with a disease now desolating so many homes.
In India alone twenty thousand human beings die annually from snake-bite,[3] and as yet no antidote has been discovered. How can we
- ↑ Wood, "Thermic Fever or Sunstroke," Philadelphia, 1872.
- ↑ Eighteen out of Wood's experiments were on the general effects of heat, as above alluded to. In six others the local effects of heat (135° to 190° Fahr.) on the brain, and in four others the local effects (up to 140° Fahr.) on the nerves were studied, and gave most valuable results, entirely and evidently unattainable on man.
- ↑ Fayrer, "Thanatophidia of India," p. 32.
