It is notorious that many needless operations are performed on women. Dr. Routh (Medical Press, May 9, 1894) mentions an instance in point.
An eminent operating surgeon paid a visit to one of his disciples, who “triumphantly brought out two dozen specimens, which he had removed from women, in bottles, which in almost every instance were free from guile.” That is to say, perfectly sound organs have been removed, on the supposition that they were diseased.
The poverty of the physicians’ department is not a little to blame for this state of affairs. It is not at all uncommon to hear medical students say, “Oh! I shall go in for surgery, there is something to be done in that; in medicine nobody knows what he is doing-it is all conjecture.” This is quite true of allopathic medicine; but the Faculty ought to take shame to itself that it is true.
Medicine is the frontier line of defence; to abandon medicine for surgery is as bad as for a general to give up all his outlying strongholds without a blow, and give the enemy a free march on the capital. The object of the general (and of the medical man) is to keep the enemy away from the centre, and avert the risk of dismemberment, by all the means in his power. This, as I shall show, is what homoeopathy can do in a very large proportion of cases.
But it is not always the operating surgeon who is to blame. Such is the effect of modern doctrines, that some patients actually demand an operation when there is no excuse for it.
They have a kind of weakness for being operated upon (furore operations in a passive sense). Some months ago quite a list of cases of the kind were recorded in one of the medical journals. A number of patients insisted on having operations performed, and they were successful in finding surgeons obliging enough to comply. One man was so convinced that he had a tumour in his p73 stomach that nothing would satisfy him but that a surgeon should open him and see. This was done, and nothing abnormal was found. But even this did not satisfy him. He was sure the surgeon did not look properly, and insisted on having it done over again.
One woman was insatiable : she had no less than seven unnecessary and unjustifiable operations performed on her.
