Читать книгу The Dawn of Modern Medicine онлайн

57 страница из 66

Before von Langenbeck’s day much stress was laid in Germany upon the importance of anatomy in its relationship to the science of surgery. It was a common practice in the medical schools, for example, to combine in one the two chairs of anatomy and surgery, and, imbued with the idea that this viewpoint was the correct one for them to adopt, the leaders in surgery, with few exceptions, strove to make advances in their branch of knowledge by cultivating energetically the study of anatomy. The efforts of von Langenbeck and his followers, on the other hand, were directed to giving new life to surgery by calling to its aid physiology, pathological anatomy and pathological histology, as well as experiments upon animals, sources of information which before von Langenbeck’s time had been very little utilized by the surgeons. Korn, in his comments upon the preceding statement, begs the reader not to interpret it as signifying that von Langenbeck permitted himself to neglect anatomy in the slightest degree. Quite the contrary, he continued to insist upon it that a knowledge of anatomy was the most useful foundation upon which a surgeon could build. As corroborative evidence of the correctness of Korn’s statement I will quote here the remarks made by an English physician who visited Goettingen in 1818 (London Quarterly Journal of Foreign Medicine and Surgery, Vol. 1, 1818–1819):—