You understand that I believe there are operations that are needed, and then needed they should be promptly done, and you that have patients that are beyond your skill send them to those that you think can do better; but I call a halt upon operations upon women that are being done to-day. Turn to your own sex and see if they don’t need it, too.
ALONZO BOOTHBY, M.D.: I did not propose to say anything upon Dr. Walton’s paper, but it has been criticized in such a spirit that I feel called upon to say a word. I do not believe that my brother Walton intended in any way to convey the idea that unnecessary and improper operations should be made. It is not the skilled surgeon nor the skilled gynaecologist that operators when he ought not to. It is in those cases where there is a diseased ovary or a diseased tube that is beyond curative measures.
You know it as well as I do. Every physician that has ever opened the abdominal cavity knows it, and when you come to the statistics there is not ten percent, of fatalities. I would speak very modestly for myself, and say that if three cases that were operated on before I came here shall recover, it will make 102 (in the Homoeopathic hospital and my own institution) successful cases, and that includes 12 or 15 hysterectomies and 6 cases of appendicitis, and the various other cases that come up. When we can do this and have these results it is entirely out of place to assume that we are removing a woman’s ovaries when we would not do the same thing to a man.
H.W. ROBY, M.D.: of Topeka: In all medical conventions that I have ever attended I have heard similar discussion to this, and I believe their necessity grows out of the fact that some minds are organized in one direction and some in another. Some men and some women in the practice of medicine give their time and their study and thought along the lines of Materia Medica and therapeutics; others, of surgery, gynaecology, and so on, and each become enthusiastic in their line and in their specialities, and very often overlook the powers and capacities of the other field of practice.
The thing that we need is, to know so much about surgical capacity, and medical capacity, and therapeutic capacity that we shall be able to make a wise and just discrimination, and use medicines where medicines are efficient, and where they are inefficient to resort to that which is efficient. I have seen, and you have seen many a time, patients subjected to medical treatment day after day, week after week, and month after month, through long and weary years, without result, who, if they had been handed over to a skilful surgeon, a slight operation might have set him on the pedestal of life and happiness. I plead here for a just discrimination between medical and surgical cases. They are both useful in their place.
Homoeopathy has a grand field in which it may be successful, but outside of that field there are other possibilities, other capacities, and other powers. if you have given time and attention to medical practice do not be too sure that that is all there is within our command for the relief of suffering humanity.
THE CHAIRMAN: If that is all, I will call upon Dr. Walton to close the debate.
DR. WALTON: Consider it closed.
