or to question the taste which exhibits the details of a surgical operation to the vulgar eye. It is not designed, even in this stirring time, after the fashion of ancient Rome, to deaden our sensibilities, or to accustom our youth to witness deeds of blood and violence without shrinking. No trace of suffering will be visible in the picture which shall pass before us. So great is the triumph which modern surgical art displays, so great the boon which it has conferred upon humanity! It is this which we propose to illustrate, by describing the single and simple process involved in cutting off a leg.
Permit us first, however, to cast a passing glance, by way of contrast, to the established and orthodox fashion of performing that operation some centuries ago. Bear with us but a moment, and in imagination hope that then, when painless surgery was unknown, no patient lacked support in his hour of trial (long hours then, in truth!) from that great and never-failing source which flows, unmeasured and unfathomable, for all humanity, alike in every age.
Until the last three or four hundred years, amputation of a limb was very rarely performed, except when, from injury or disease, its extremity had begun to mortify; and then, few surgeons ventured to make incisions in the sound portion, but limited themselves to an operation through the tissues which had already lost their vitality. This timidity was due to the fact that they were unacquainted with any effectual means of stopping the bleeding from the larger arteries divided by the knife. Certain and easy as is the control of such bleeding now, by the simple process of tying a piece of thread or silk round the extremity of the bleeding vessel (as we shall hereafter see), it was unknown, at all events as applicable to amputation, to any surgical writer from Hippocrates, 400 B.C., or from Celsus, who flourished in the first Christian century, to the fifteenth. Consequently, the numerous instances of injury and disease, in which life is now saved by a timely resort to amputation, were then always fatal. Hence, also, arose the various expedients which the more adventurous operators of the time resorted to, in order to stop fatal bleeding, with the effect only of increasing the patient's torture, and with the attainment of no good result. Thus the incisions were performed with a red-hot knife, that the divided vessels, seared and charred by the horrible contact, might contract, or become plugged, and so be prevented from bleeding (Albucasis, 11th century). Effective for the instant, the force of the circulation quickly overpowered the slender obstruction, and fatal hæmorrhage, sooner or later, took place. Yet this plan continued more or less in vogue down to the discovery of the ligature in the 16th century, and was practised even later in Germany by the celebrated Hildanus (1641); although he subsequently adopted the new method. According to another fashion, the surgeon, after making a tedious division of the flesh down to the bone, with studied endeavour not to divide the arteries until the last moment, relied on applications of red-hot irons, or of some styptic fluid, usually a powerful acid or astringent, to arrest the bleeding. If these were not successful, a vessel of boiling
