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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: knife and grafting of healthy skin, and the lymphatic glands nearer the body remain free from infection, the propriety of amptating the limb must become the subject for consultation. It will sometimes be the painful duty of the surgeon to urge upon a reluctant patient to sacrifice a limb in the hope of saving life; and if this advice is followed before infection of the glands has taken place, the result has often proved the soundness of the advice; while too great delay, or want of earnestness in urging- submission to so serious an alternative as the loss of a limb must always be, may lead to protracted suffering and inevitable death. I have yet another subject for your consideration, one which the general public enters into with a good deal of warm feeling and an amount of ignorance which calls rather for instruction than blame. I mean the removal of cancerous growths by cauterization instead of by the knife. On this point let me read to you what our great master, John Hunter, said just a hundred years ago (Palmer's edition of his works, vol. i., page 625) as to cures for cancer: No cure has yet been found: for what I call a cure is an alteration of the disposition and the effect of that disposition, and not the destruction of the cancerous parts. But as we have no such medicine, we are often obliged to remove cancerous parts, which extirpation, however, will often cure as well as. we could do by changing the disposition and action. Arsenic seems to have some power of this kind, and its effects might be increased, by being used internally and externally; but its use is very dangerous, and I am afraid insufficient for the disease. This is a remedy which enters into the empirical nostrums which are in vogue for curing cancer; and among which Plunkett's holds the highest ran...