Under Chloroform.
Most people take an interest in any authentic account of the mode in which important surgical operations are performed, whenever opportunity is offered of gratifying their very natural curiosity. Such opportunities are however somewhat rare. The columns of the newspaper press not unfrequently supply brief, and sometimes curiously incorrect, particulars of the injuries resulting from "an appalling accident" of the night previous, to some unfortunate workman who has fallen from a scaffold, or been mutilated by a railway train. Scraps of hearsay are eagerly gathered up by the penny-a-liner, who, like the fireman's dog of notorious ubiquity, is always first on the spot after the occurrence of a catastrophe; and a remarkable combination of technical phrases culled from the brief remarks of the surgeon in attendance, and from the slender stock which has accumulated in the reporter's brain from previous experiences, makes its appearance in to-morrow's daily journals, and is certain to be reproduced in all the weeklies of Saturday next. Then it is the great public learns with profound horror that some poor victim's shoulder-joint has been dislocated in three places, that the carotid artery was pronounced (surgeons are invariably said to "pronounce") to be fractured, or that there was great contusion and ecchymosis (always a trying word for the compositor) about the spine, and that amputation would probably be necessary.
But sometimes it happens that an over-prying public, with a curiosity not much in this instance to be commended, peeps within the pages of the medical press, hoping to unravel some of the mysteries of professional craft. Ten to one that it gets nothing but error for its pains. The technicalities which medical men must necessarily employ when writing for each other, are instructive only to the initiated, and are pregnant with blunders for the simple reader. And few people make more mistakes than our medical amateur who, on the strength of a weekly perusal of The Lancet at his club, sets up as an authority in the social circle on questions of physiology and physic.
Occasionally, moreover, after dinner, when the ladies have left the table, and the men alone remain to empty decanters and derange a dessert, one has the gratification of meeting some very young gentleman, who, the week before last, presented his proud father with the diploma of "the college," elegantly framed and glazed, in return for an education which has cost five years and a thousand pounds, and who astonishes his elderly associates with a highly-tinted sketch of some operative achievement, in which perchance he assisted at the hospital. As he surveys the auditory, silent and absorbed by his heart-stirring description, and complacently witnesses the admiration which such evidence of his own familiarity with harrowing scenes, and of his apparent absence of emotion, elicits, it is to be feared that its influence, associated with that of the port, a beverage appre-
