Democratic Sentinel, Volume 17, Number 14, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 21 April 1893 — Notes on Medical Science. [ARTICLE]

Notes on Medical Science.

One hundred years ago American medical literature comprised one medical book, three reprints, and about twenty pamphlets. This was the beginning of a medical literature which now challenges the profoundest respeet of the scientific world. To-day exclusively American - literature comprises between six and seven thousand medical books and reprints and twenty thousand pamphlets. New medical books and monographs are now appearing from the American press at the rate of one a day, and the members of the American medical profession, in addition to the above, are contributing annually six thousand articles upon professional subjects to tho medical journals of the world. One hundred years ago we had no hospitals, no medical colleges, no medical libraries. Yes, there was one small hospital in Philadelphia known as the Pennsylvania Hospital, and it had a medical library of 250 voliimes. Now hospitals crowd every city. There are 120 medical colleges, several hundred valuable medical libraries, and 100 organized training schools for nurses. At the breaking out of the Revolutionary war there were only 200 men practicing medicine, the Sangrados of that day, and to-day there are 100,000 in the medical profession. The advance in medicine and’ surgery has been greater In the United States than anywhere else on earth. The man who takes a survey of the field as it apr jared a hundred years ago, and tries to make a like survey of the field of medicine and surgery to-day, is simply appalled at the advance made.