Took my wife to the Ear, Nose and Throat guy today, and on the table there was a book entitled something like "Pictorial History of Medical Photographs of Respiratory Diseases - 1840's to 1880's", so of course I had to pick it up.
This was a neat book from the Burn's Collection showing stark early photos of doctors and surgeons at work, and patients and their wounds.
Back in the days of "a fast surgeon is the best surgeon" and where the bone saw was a major tool, these brave doctors stomached some gross stuff to advance medical knowledge.
We could not be where we are today if these doctors had not done the groundwork that future knowledge could be built upon. Each stage of learning had to be gone thru before it was possible to advance to the next.
These guys were learning by experience about antiseptics, ether and chloroform, and how to properly close up a chest wound. Some of their pioneering procedures remain unchanged until this day.
Thank goodness for natural human curiosity for individual human achievement.
Coincidentally, I was walking through Bushnell Park in Hartford CT last evening and noted a statue of "Horace Wells...the Father of Anesthesia".
Wells, who was born in Hartford, Vermont eventually wound up practicing dentistry in Hartford CT, where he and his partner William T. G. Morton experimented with chloroform and nitrous oxide.
Bless their hearts (and others like them).
Cowboy
Atlanta has a hospital called Grady Memorial. It is named after Henry Woodfin Grady who pioneered the use of ether as an anesthetic.
On a side note. I was in the hospital looking after my mother this week. In the radiology waiting room most of the magazines were older issues of "The American Rifleman" published by the NRA. You KNOW you're in the heartland when those are the majority of reading material.
Andy
