Page:A hundred years hence - the expectations of an optimist (IA hundredyearshenc00russrich).pdf/132

 from the quivering flesh of the sentient patient, held down by muscular assistants lest the violent struggles of his agony should embarrass the surgeon, and that wounds of all sorts festered and decayed until a hospital reeked with their impurity—in other words, that discoveries so great as anæsthesia and antisepsis are well within living memory—we need not hesitate to predict for the present century changes in medical and surgical science almost inconceivable by the light of our present attainment. Anæsthetics—of which the local kinds, as cocaine and eucaine, are of entirely recent use—represent an advance in one direction. Antiseptic surgery, which is the prevention and correction of blood and wound-poisoning by chemical disinfectants, represented an advance of a different kind. But antisepsis is already on the point of being superseded by the far more rational and scientific method of asepsis, or the exclusion from open wounds of all the germs which can set up inflammation and festering. The change is typical.

The direction in which medicine is chiefly working at the present time is that of introducing into the body one disease with the idea of excluding other diseases. It is conceived that cow-pox is antagonistic to small-pox, erysipelas possibly to cancer, and so on. All the talk in medical circles is of serum and attenuated virus. And, apart from animal