Living pathology is the important contribution of modern surgery to the medical sciences. It is the study of surgical diseases in their various stages of activity, either a return to the normal or the destruction of life, in contrast with dead pathology, which is based on the study of terminal tissue changes after the somatic death of the individual. This study of living pathology, especially in surgical diseases of the abdominal viscera, has banished old misconceptions of their clinical expression, and has given to present day diagnosis a refinement which existed only in our dreams in former days. It has been truly said:
'Tis man's worst fault to let the things That have been run to waste, and in the Unmeaning present sink the past.
The understanding which gives a meaning to present-day surgery has been developed from a knowledge of the faltering steps of scientific progress up to the