Robert T. Morris

Robert T. Morris, A. M., M. D., was a Professor in Surgery at the New York Post-Graduate Medical School (around 1912). The renowned New York doctor, Robert T. Morris (1857-1945), who struggled with a reactionary profession to pioneer sterility, small incisions, and better wound-healing in surgery. Blessed with abundant energy, sagacity, and long life, he also achieved distinction as a naturalist, horticulturist, and explorer, celebrating nature with brilliant prose and poetry. For those days, Morris was a rare visionary, grounded in science and courageously fighting on the side of suffering humanity, though few remember him today.

FIFTY YEARS A SURGEON

Another difficult situation arose when my friend Dr. Brown left his surgery in a small town one evening and went out on the marsh to look for ducks. He was not a wing shot. Wading silently through reeds and cat tails he saw half a dozen ducks in a little opening and promptly fired at them. A man jumped up with a shout of pain from the cover behind them. They were decoy ducks.

FIFTY YEARS A SURGEON

This is only natural. The busy practitioner has little time for anything except his work and the most necessary recreation. The highly successful doctor or surgeon is over-run with patients, and if he is conscientious, he works unceasingly at his job until he becomes incapacitated through age or illness.

MICROBES, MICROBOPHOBIA AND THE ABUSE OF GERMICIDES

Inimical microbes as well as body cells are composed of protoplasm. Both are simple in form and structure but highly organized chemically, and in the course of evolution have come to be the peers of each other as a result of the struggle for existence. In Natures eyes, “one is just as good as the other”, and both have a right to live.