A memoir / by Sir Samuel Wilks.

  • Wilks, Samuel, Sir, 1824-1911.
Date:
1911
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: A memoir / by Sir Samuel Wilks. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    quently on the left side, but it is of no great im- portance except from the effect it so often produces —of an extreme anguish of mind as well as the body, the latter being a sinking feeling at the pit of the stomach and a confirmed belief of impotence which renders life a misery. The patient is generally always taking medicine and not infrequently applies to a surgeon to have his testicles removed. Sir Astley relates a case where a surgeon removed a testis on account of the man’s importunity, but he considered himself justified in performing the operation as the patient had received a blow on the testis which might have caused the constant neuralgia. Sir Astley Cooper then proceeds by saying that the operation of tying the veins which had been proposed was too hazardous to venture upon, but suggested another plan of removing the scrotum, and then the cicatriculum would contract the skin and shrivel up the veins. I might here remark that surgeons at that time avoided by all possible means the opening or injury of a vein as it so often carried with it some infectious matter and so produced the dreaded pyaemia. I might mention here that I once witnessed an all but fatal result from the operation of tying the spermatic veins, but this was by an embolus passing into the heart; after a sudden collapse and failure of the pulse, there was a rally in the course of some hours and then a slow recovery ; the patient was a young and healthy officer in the Army. In the next volume of the ‘ Hospital Reports ’ is a case operated on by Mr. Bransby Cooper after his