In submitting this subject for discussion, I do not hope to offer anything new, but desire merely to present an outline, an approach to which has served to reduce my mortality and to improve my results in other respects.
In offering surgical relief in an individual instance, we should be prepared to give the following reasonable and adequate assurance:
First.
—That the risk to life, as this particular operation is to be done, is not out of proportion to the gravity of the disease. What chiefly concerns a patient undergoing operation is the risk to which she is subjected by the given surgeon with the facilities at his command, and not the death rate from this particular operation as done by the masters of surgery. In surgery, as in every other sphere of human endeavor, the element of personal equation largely determines results—one operator will habitually have a