Conspicuous among the many notable urologic achievements characterizing the close of the nineteenth and the dawn of the twentieth centuries stands the establishment of prostatectomy—or more properly speaking prostatic adenomectomy—as a feasible, desirable and comparatively safe operative procedure. The surgical treatment of adenomatosis of the prostate, alias prostatic hypertrophy, has changed most remarkably since the days of Mercier's incisor and Leroy d'Etiolle's valvular section of the neck, to the modern conservative perineal operation of Proust-Young or the suprapubic transvesical prostatectomy of Fuller-Freyer.
Although it is generally conceded that the mortality due to danger of infection from catheter life in prostatism, in those cases in which that form of treatment is possible or justifiable, is to-day at least twice as great as from a skilfully performed prostatic adenomectomy, the fact exists that for more than a decade following the first so-called total prostatectomy in 1891 by Goodfellow, the death-rate incident to