History of medical practice in Illinois - Bushnell Historical Society

346 History of Medical Practice in Illinoiscan re-gery has been changed by the work of Lister and his coworkers. Imember my first season as house surgeon, in one of the largest and newestof the Western hospitals (Cook County Hospital), when throughout thatlong and, to me, sad season, scarcely one patient was submitted to anymajor or semiserious operation who did not die of blood poisoning. I sawmen die after what seemed to me even minor operations. Scarcely a patiententered the hospital with a compound fracture whose doom was not sealed.Tracheotomy was a useless performance; trephining was interesting as aspectacle, but useless as a resource. Even internal urethrotomy became afatal procedure; and so throughout the list. This was in the years of grace1876 and 1877."According to the printed records, the pioneers in antiseptic surgery inChicago were Edmund Andrews, who said that he had devised means somewhatsimpler than Lister's "rather complex methods," Henry Banga, EdwinPowell and Christian Fenger. Henry Banga, a Swiss physician from Basel,where he had applied the antiseptic treatment of compound complicatedfracture, with brilliant results, came to Chicago in 1876 and according toHolinger "introduced antisepsis in Chicago and the West." In 1878 Bangawrote that "union by first intention is the rule (in kolpoperineoplasty) ifthe operator observes the principles long established for that purpose,particularly if the antiseptic treatment be carefully pursued." Goldspohnstated that antisepsis in surgery was introduced in Chicago in the CookCounty Hospital "during March 1878, by Dr. Edwin Powell, who hadobserved its use at length in the hands of its author, Joseph Lister, at King'sCollege Hospital, London." In an autobiographic sketch Fenger wrotethat in 1878 or 1879 he "introduced the antiseptic—Lister's—operativemethods" in the Cook County Hospital.It appears, then, that in Chicago as elsewhere Lister's methods weretaken up by several surgeons at about the same time. It is undoubtedly truethat, as Bayard Holmes has said, antiseptic surgery in the Cook CountyHospital could never have made the headway that it did in the 1880's hadnot the trained nurse preceded it in the hospital wards. That Chicago didnot lag much, if at all, behind other parts of the country in the matter ofsurgical antisepsis is evident from the following statement made in 1877by Robert F. Weir:"It is only lately that, in America, attention has been given practically tothe teachings of Lister in respect to the treatment of wounds. In fact, asidefrom an article by Schuffert in the New Orleans Med. & Surg. Jour., little ornothing has appeared in our medical journals relative to the results of theso-called antiseptic method. Within the past year, however, a change hasoccurred, due probably both to the interest excited by the personal expositionsof Lister at our late Medical Congress at Philadelphia, and also to