The profession of medicine

Abstract

Medicine has made more progress in the last half century than in all the previous years. During that period the germ causes of most all of the infectious diseases have been found and many have been conquered. With the discovery of anesthesia, the terrors of surgery have been stilled and the deepest furrow in the knotted brow of agony has been smoothed away forever. Formerly the patient had to be restrained during the few minutes necessary for operations. With the aid of modern anesthesia, we can almost steal the trouble away from the patient, so to speak. All the great pestilences and grave epidemics have been throttled. Preventive medicine and hygiene have been so greatly advanced that the average life span of the sixteenth century, twenty-five years, has been increased to fifty-nine years. Antisepsis or cleanliness in surgery was introduced by Lister, who afterward became lord of the English realm and of medicine. The work of Pasteur, the greatest spirit that ever entered the kingdom of science, taught us the relationship of microorganisms to the cause and the prevention of certain murderous diseases as well as the association of the microscopic world with the chemistry of fermentation and other beneficent activities of germ life.