Brooklyn in the early history of appendicitis : some personal recollections / by William J. Cruikshank.

  • Cruikshank, William J.
Date:
1912
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Licence: In copyright

Credit: Brooklyn in the early history of appendicitis : some personal recollections / by William J. Cruikshank. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    BROOKLYN IN THE EARLY HISTORY OF APPENDICITIS. SOME PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS.* By William J. Cruikshank, M.D., of Brooklyn, N. Y. THE history of appendicitis is perhaps the most dramatic in all the literature of medicine and surgery. This disease, this insidious enemy of human life, this masked assassin of perfect health, this destroyer of the noblest and the best, a hidden monster with centuries of unchecked ravage to its sinister account, elusive, baffling, dissimulating, rapacious, murderous, stands today, in the light of modern science, unmasked, stripped of its last shred of disguise, the most thoroughly understood and the most successfully combated of all important surgical affections with which mankind is afflicted. This is a triumph of medicine and surgery alike. When a splendid work has been accomplished, a desire to feel that one has contributed something to the result, is both natural and commendable; the satisfaction which comes of the assurance that one has the right to such a feeling, is not to be condemned as selfish complacency: and so, it seems to me, Brooklyn is justified in feeling some pride when she reviews her share in the early history of appendicitis. To me, this is a matter of unusual interest, because all of my professional life has been spent here and, although it began no later than about a quarter of a century ago, that beginning antedates the dawn of rational medicine and surgery. During those early eighties the cause of disease was practically unknown. Bacteriology as applied to medicine was in embryo. Puerperal fever was common. The peritoneum was holy ground. Antiseptic and clean surgery had not as yet been developed. It was the day of “typhlitic” disease; the word appendi- citis had yet to be born. Over and over again the greatest clinicians had come to the very threshold of the solution of appendicular mischief, had been misled by the names which appeared there— perityphlitis, paratyphlitis and the like—and, restrained by fear of entering that holy of holies—the peritoneal cavity—had halted: the truth remained undisclosed. Over and over again during the pre- ceding fifty years the light which had been flashed upon the etiology of inflammatory troubles originating in the right iliac region, bringing the field at times into almost complete illumination, had as often been slowly dimmed by the obscuring pathology of autopsy. In brief, the universal and persistent use by the teachers in our profession, the world over, of befogging and misleading pathological and etiological phrase- ology and nomenclature remained, for years, the stumbling block in the development of rationality in the treatment of right iliac inflam- mations. When to this was added the time-honored fear of peritoneal invasion, the diseased appendix was enabled to retain its fortified ♦Read before the Caledonian Medical Society, September 22, 1911; read before the Medical Society of the County of Kings, January 16, 1912.