Book Description:
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: VIVISECTION AND BRAIN SURGERY1 To 'Harper's Magazine' for October, 1889, I contributed a paper in which I demonstrated the fact, and to some extent the causes, of the recent marvelous progress of surgery. In this, as in an earlier publication, I attributed it to a large extent to vivisection. Both publicly and privately my statements have been called in question. The seven years which have elapsed since my first publication on this subject have demonstrated, far more than I even hoped or expected, the truth of what I then stated, and it would seem right that some of these demonstrated facts should be laid before the public. Moreover, the recent revival of the discussion of the subject before the Church Congress at Folkestone, England,2 and at the recent meeting of the Humane Society in Philadelphia in October, 1892, makes it especially timely. I shall omit many topics which would be suitable, such as the wonderful results of Pasteur's treatment of hydrophobia, the discoveries of bacteriology, the wholly new class of remedies which medicine owes to vivisection, such as the antidotes to lockjaw and several other diseases, derived from the blood of animals inoculated with the virus of these diseases remedies to which we already owe astonishing cures. In the present paper I propose to limit myself to brain surgery alone, and to give a glimpse of what has been done up to the present time. I shall show especially that without the exact knowledge of the functions of the brain, derived almost wholly from experimentation upon animals, it would be simply impossible to do whatLas been accomplished. I shall not restrict myself to general assertions which may easily be denied, but I shall relate actual cases, with their definite results, and the authority for each case. 1 Reprint...
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