Bøger af Louis Fu

Since 1800, more progress has been made than in the preceding 3,000 years. This is largely attributed to work conducted in the dissecting room and laboratory. Key milestones in the 19th-century surgical history include the discovery of anesthesia, antiseptic surgery based on bacteriology, and changes in medical education methods. The Anatomy Act of 1832 in Great Britain removed restrictions on procuring human bodies for dissection. The significant strides in morbid anatomy, pathological anatomy, and experimental pathology have all strongly influenced the advancement of modern surgery.

In the history of progress of civilisation, surgery precedes internal medicine with regard to accurate observation of lesions and of their results on the human body. Speculations about the four humours, medical constitutions and vital spirits did not concern the minds of the ancient peoples in their attempts to observe and describe the signs of different forms of fractures and dislocations, the danger of wounds in different localities, or the different varieties of tumours. From Antiquity up to the eighteenth century, surgery in the Western world was more of a craft than a science. This book chronicles the development of ancient surgical practices in the Orient (China, India, and the Islamic world), through the glories of classical Greece, to the decline in the Middle Ages and pre-Renaissance era. The revival of art and science in Western Europe led to the medical Renaissance and medical revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries respectively. Surgery gradually moved from the barbers and barber-surgeons to the scientific surgeons of the Age of Enlightenment in the eighteenth century. This is evident from the dominance of British and French surgeons.

Whatever controversies may have surrounded the use of eponymns in medicine, they are here to stay. In science as well as in medicine, eponymns bring the present members of the profession closer to their predecessors. This is more so in orthopaedics, even if sometimes there are political and national issues involved in the choice of specific names. This volume is the first of a projected three-volume work, which when completed, will span classic orthopaedic literature from the pre-Christian era to the twentieth century. The selection is entirely the author's personal preference, and in no way reflects the relative importance of the individual eponymns. It is his wish to bring back a sense of nostalgia in these halycon days of busy practice, but at the same time to stimulate an investigatory spirit among members of the profession to search for their roots.

Up to the late 18th and early19th centuries, although surgeons featured in the previous two volumes had been pioneering the surgical treatment of bone and joint diseases, yet there were no attempts to establish orthopaedics as a specialty. The ¿new¿ orthopaedics is more than surgery. The orthopaedic surgeon is a personal teacher, and in two directions¿of the patient¿s mind quite as much as of his muscles and joints. It is not simply a surgical matter, but an individual, human problem, requiring prolonged attention and study of each case. Industrialization and war had contributed to the increase of crippling diseases in adults. By the turn of the century, orthopaedic surgery began to see daylight in the care of crippled patients on both sided of the Atlantic. The early part of the 20th century has given to orthopaedics both meaning and substance. Hugh Owen Thomas of Liverpool and his nephew Robert Jones were the driving forces behind this development. Its scope was defined by Jones as, ¿based on, and consists of, the recognition and practice of definite principles of treatment, whether operative, manipulative or educational, which lead to the restoration of function in nerves.

Prior to the nineteenth century, the practice of surgery in the West was as more a craft than science. Modern surgery is based upon foundations that were firmly established from the end of the eighteenth century to the nineteenth century ¿ the Age of Scientific Medicine. It was a product of nineteenth-century so-ciety, when scientific discoveries provided the rationale for the-ories and actions. Anatomy, bacteriology, chemistry, pathology, pharmacology, physics and physiology all influenced the shaping of the ¿new surgery¿. It is the author¿s hope to provide students and practitioners with little time or opportunity for consulting the original documents, the means of ascertaining the periods and places in which the leading surgeons of the past had done their work. The best historical literature on surgery is in the formal treatises, but it requires leisure, patience, and access to a large library to make historical studies really interesting.

When the first foreign medical practitioners came to China, their attention was naturally riveted by the unusual and bizarre nature of Chinese medical theories and practice. Likewise, few foreigners were able to look beneath the surface of Chinese medicine. Urged as they were by their desire to send home accounts of what they had witnessed, they subconsciously depicted things in contrast to progress made in the West. The history of Chinese medicine which, up to the end of the nineteenth century, had been a mere ¿hobby¿ or ¿alternative career¿ of unsuccessful scholars and/or officials, has become the subject of universal interest. As one of the oldest branch of medicine, human anatomy is the basis of the diagnosis and treatment of diseases. This short monograph spans over two millenniums of history of anatomy in China. By highlighting certain significant episodes in anatomical happenings, it attempts to depict its evolution from an empirical and philosophical concept to a scientifically-based discipline. The special role played by Western medical science is emphasized.