Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 27.djvu/21

Rh tried by deadly experiments upon man, or else be hopelessly given up?

In 1869 I was called to see a man suffering to the last degree from an abscess in the loin. I recognized the fact that it arose from the kidney, but I was powerless. All that I could do was to mitigate, and that, alas! but little, his pitiless sufferings till death came to his relief, after nearly a year of untold agony. I have never forgotten his sufferings, nor the sharp pain 1 felt when I learned, two years later, how I might possibly have saved his life. In the very same year (1869), Simon, of Heidelberg, had a woman under his care suffering from urinary fistulæ from a healthy kidney—a surgical accident he in vain tried to heal. That she could live with one kidney had the other gradually been disabled by disease was probable, for one such diseased kidney had been already removed three times when mistaken for ovarian disease; and physiologists had often removed one or both kidneys in animals. But no one had removed a healthy kidney, and then studied the effects on the remaining kidney and upon the heart; no one had tested what was the best method of reaching the kidney, whether by the abdomen or the loin, or how to deal with its capsule, or the hemorrhage, or the surgical after-effects. Of course, Simon could have tried the experiment on his patient, blindly trusting to Providence for the result. But he chose the wiser course. He studied the previous literature, experimented on a number of dogs and watched the points above noted, tried various methods of operating upon the dead body, and, after weighing all the pros and cons, deliberately cut down upon the kidney of his patient after a carefully formulated plan, not by the abdomen, but through the loin, and saved her life. She died in 1877, after eight years of healthy life, free from her loathsome disorder.

Now, what have been the results of these experiments upon a few dogs? One hundred and ninety-eight times the kidney has been removed, and 105 human lives have been saved; 83 times abscesses in the kidney have been opened, and 66 lives saved; 17 times stones have been removed from the kidney without a single death—or, in all, in the last fifteen years, 298 operations, and 188 human lives saved. Besides this, as an extension of the operation in 17 cases, in which the kidney, having no such attachments as ought to anchor it in place, was floating loosely in the abdomen and a source of severe pain, it has been cut down upon and sewed fast in its proper place; and all of these patients but one recovered.

Looking to the future, when not hundreds but thousands of human beings will enjoy the benefits of these operations, and in increasing percentages of recoveries, are not the sufferings inflicted on these few dogs amply justified as in the highest sense kind and humane?