We have only a few surgeons. To a degree they cooperate, but one surgeon is not likely to call in his competitor as an assistant during an operation. The competitor feels he is a good, if not better, than the surgeon who is operating, and would not care too much to be in the position of an assistant. It sometimes happens in a difficult operation, but as a general thing, the surgeon prefers to have a more or less untrained person assist him. That is the way it is in Brattleboro.
DR. THOMAS K. MOORE (Sharon Center, Ohio): My experience in surgery has been very favorable. I have done many cataracts on blind people, and I see those people going around seeing, and seeing nicely, after tenor fifteen years of postsurgical life, so that has been a very successful operation.
I am not doing any cataracts now in that way. We do them with the similimum, o as near to that as we can get, and we get some very satisfactory results that way, but not in these total cataracts. We don’t cure them up so they can see, but we have improved the people a great deal, so that they have not needed surgery in these latter days. DR. DAYTON T. PULFORD (Toledo, Ohio): I am glad that these two papers came one after the other the underlying theme of both of them is that we have first to be oriented as to where we are, after that it is up to the individual judgment of the physician as to what method he wants to pursue. We cannot go staggering around in the dark. We have to use whatever means we can to orient ourselves, which I think is perfectly proper.
DR. MOORE: About the surgeon going fishing-the more the surgeons go fishing and operate on the fish, the better. The is much better than operating on humans.
I left sorry for the resident when the was stuck with the responsibility. I was stuck with the responsibility when I was resident, and incidentally, I will make one comment I achieved a little reputation that pleased me very much. We ran into post- operative bellies extremely rigid, and one thing and another. Dr.Grimmer told me to remember that Carbo veg. is an awfully good remedy to unlock the bellies.
I was left in charge over a week with a critical situation, a lovely and highly thought of woman, and the nurse in charge was at her wits’ end, so I decided only own initiative confide in this nurse and tell her what I doing, but not to enter the information on the chart, because I didn’t want any homoeopathic controversy before the Medical Board. She agreed, and be cause of the results that followed the administration of a few tables or 12x of Carbo veg., which was all I had, for years the nurses used to waylay me and I used to supply little boxes of Carbo veg. to avoid the necessity of pituitrin and the other drugs they used.
DR. ENSTAM (closing): I am surprised at the amount of interest in this paper. I was a little bit doubtful as to whether I would present it in person or hand it in and run.
DR. MOORE: One fine thing about this paper is that it is brief.
DR. ENSTAM : Right! You told me that years ago, and I have always followed it, but the editors don’t like you and they don’t like me.
DR. SUTHERLAND: It makes our task easier if the paper is brief.
DR. ENSTAM: It does that, Each and every one of you present has a sound opinion of his own. I merely want to point up the fact that I think primarily, since we have a working knowledge of this wonderful thing we call homoeopathy, we are fools not to sit up and make it behave for us. We have very little need for scalpel therapy. We have a better agent, a preventive agent.
The reason I spoke about assistantship, and so forth, doctor, is that I have had pretty fair surgical training, so good that surgeon in Chicago, a confrere of Will Mayo, invited me to become his assistant, offered himself as my preceptor in surgery if I would accept it in preference to following Hahnemann. He had a million-dollar practice, if ever there was one, in the old days.
I don’t mind surgery, but it is a mechanical thing and leaves a great deal to be desired. I was a poor boy, a minister’s son, and ministers’ sons don’t inherit anything except the ability to enter controversies.
DR. MOORE: And they know how to travel and live in different places.
DR. ENSTAM: And live on nothing, too. That is the missionary spirit.
But I have been interested in surgery and when I came to the hospital Los Angeles and succeeded in landing a residency, which was a matter of self-preservation for me, financially, I was the only homoeopath in a den of non-homoeopaths, and if you want to try something out, go out as a resident, and I was asked to do this and to that y the old-timers, but I was dumb founded to ding our how few of these men did the kind of surgery I would like to have done on me or mine, and their attitude postoperatively. They would do their surgery on Thursday thirty years old, incomplete charge of these cases until they would show up at seven, eight, or nine o’clock on Monday morning.
I found one number of occasions that a good surgeon would do just as you do in your town, invite the referring physician to be his surgical assistant, whether he had skill or not. The operating surgeons felt that he could cover the situation if something would happen. One time the surgeon became ill. The assistant was as panicky as the nurse, and called me in, and I had to finish the job, and I didn’t qualify as a major surgeon in the sense of specializing in it, but, representing the institution, I simply had to do it.
You, in your town, are doing the right thing. I would be the last person i the world to question any procedure that would disturb the ethical relationship between you and your practice, and if you are a good surgical assistant, that doesnt bar you as a homoeopath from rendering that service. I mentioned that in the paper. But I say this: I don’t think we should expect to go with that patient, be a part of the package deal, wen we don’t qualify very well. I think you do much better to remain, as the homoeopath, as you say. You do prescribe for them and insist on that, but don’t get you hand in the belly if you don’t have to.
I want to thank each of you for your comments and the interest you have shown. Thank you very much.
