Page:The Hunterian Oration 1839.djvu/34

THE HUNTERIAN ORATION. 27 has so well supplied. If we turn moreover to the treatises by Wiseman on hernia and dislocations ; most instructive lessons will they be found to contain, as they shew that every thing in relation to these important subjects, which we regard of value in practice, has been created by that union of science to surgery, to which the labours of Hunter have so especially tended. Upon one achievement of modern surgery, I must be permitted to dwell,—the art of crushing the stone in the urinary bladder to fragments, to a powder that shall imperceptibly escape through the natural passage for the urine. With intense interest must we now revert to the almost incredulous feeling, with which, the first announcement of such an operation was received but three-and-twenty years ago, as haying been performed upon his own person, by a Colonel in our Indian service, who passed to the bladder, through a tube, a whalebone, at the end of which was a steel watch-spring, wherewith he contrived to act upon the stone.* The narrator of this proceeding observes that, no surgeon can effect this for another person, that to place the stone and the saw in their right position can only be done by the patient for himself. But the surgeon of our day, aided by mechanical skill of the highest order, does accomplish


 * Some Remarks on the Arts of India. By H. Scott, M.D.

The Journal of Science and the Arts. Edited at the Royal Institu- tion of Great Britain, yol. i., 1816. �