Professor Léon Lefort, editor, or more accurately speaking, author of successive issues of Malgaigne's Surgery, and one of the leading operators in France, is not a person whom even the most venturesome of recent graduates will be apt to accuse of undue timorousness in matters chirurgical. Much weight may, therefore, happily be attached to a warning from such a source against the reckless and ill-considered abuse of the knife, which has unfortunately been rendered possible by the introduction of anæsthetics and antiseptic measures, and which has reached so far that the legitimate field of surgery has often been abandoned in an apparent endeavor to ascertain how much vivisection is compatible with the temporary maintenance of life.
Among the things which have almost become affairs of everyday routine, LeFort remarks, cancerous stomachs have been resected, the spleen and the kidney extirpated, vesical tumors removed, the uterus and tubes ablated; multitudes of