Page:The growth of medicine from the earliest times to about 1800.djvu/609

 chief advantage to be gained by the employment of this instrument consisted—as was claimed by Frère Jean and his nephew, Pascal Baseilhac,—in the fact that in this way the danger of making the incision in the wrong place, or of too great length, was materially diminished.

The first patient upon whom the new instrument was tried (October 8, 1748), was a dealer in lime, sixty years of age and in rather delicate health. In less than three weeks after the operation, he was entirely cured. Subsequently the instrument was employed in a large number of instances, and the method was found to be most satisfactory; successful results being obtained—on the average—in twelve out of thirteen cases, whereas the best results previously obtained by the method commonly employed at that period was 50 per cent of cures. At a still later date the statistics showed even better results—viz., 96 cures in one group of 100 cases, and 316 cures in a second group of 330 cases.

Owing to the rapidly increasing number of patients affected with stone in the bladder who wished to be operated upon by Frère Jean himself, he established in Paris in 1753, near the Saint Honoré gateway, a special hospital for lithotomy cases, and kept it in active service up to the time of his death. The laboring classes, and the poor in general, were not expected to pay any fees, and indeed money was often bestowed upon these people when they left the hospital, to enable them to return comfortably to their villages; those in moderate circumstances were asked to pay only the expenses that had been incurred in their behalf; and the well-to-do made such voluntary contributions as they thought proper toward the support of the hospital. The registers of the institution showed that, first and last, over one thousand operations had been performed there, either by Frère Jean or by his nephew, Pascal Baseilhac. Our monk's death occurred on July 8, 1781.

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