FIFTY YEARS A SURGEON

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Sometimes it becomes difficult for young surgeons to know what charge to make for services rendered. They go to older men for advice. One of the younger doctors, Dr. Santangelo, was completing an operation just as I stepped into the door of the operating-room. A little later, meeting me in the hallway, he said, “I do not know just how to charge that patient. Please give me advice.”.

I replied, “You have given him permanent relief from a distressing condition. The work was nicely performed, and he should now be enabled to follow his occupation in good spirit. What is his occupation?”.

“He is a burglar. He will pay anything that I ask him to pay, but he will have to go out and get it. How much shall I charge?”.

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.

Knowing that the small shot would not injure a man seriously at that distance, Dr. Brown, unrecognized backed out of the reeds in the gloaming, made his way back to the surgery, and had just changed his clothes when in came the man to have the shot taken out. To avert suspicion the doctor had to charge him twenty-five dollars.

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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.
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