Democratic Sentinel, Volume 18, Number 13, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 13 April 1894 — A GENEROUS SACRIFICE. [ARTICLE]

A GENEROUS SACRIFICE.

A New York Doctor Gives His Blood For a Patient. The layman’s invariable test of surgery is implied in his question, “Did the patient get well?” If the answer is negative, he doesn’t care for the operation. The doctor’s views are not so prejudiced. He knows surgery when he sees it, and recognize* the merit of it, when it has merit, without regard to idiosyncrasies of the patient. When the doctor says that the operation was entirely successful, but the patient died, the layman usually says nothing, but looks despondent. But even a layman can understand the success of that operation the other day at the Long Island College Hospital, whereby the blood of Dr. Franklin Kemp was run into the veins of Kate Pomphrey. Kate Pomphrey had been found almost asphyxiated with gas, and was dying. Dr. Kemp, the house surgeon at the hospital, proposed to try transfusion of blood, and offered to contribute the blood. The operation was done before two hundred students in the operating-room of the hospital, and though mischances delayed its success and a lot of good blood was wasted, through the efforts of two surgeons, and largely through Dr. Kemp’s own pluck and persistence, it was presently made to work right, and for five minutes blood did run through a tube out of his veins and into hers. The effect was immediate. The woman, who had been black in the face and very near death, revived at once,and though she died twenty-four hours later of other complications (Bright’s disease), it remains clear chat her life was saved for the time being by Dr. Kemp’s loan of a share of his own abundant vitality. Dr. Kemp’s prompt and generous benevolence is highly praised, and rightly; nevertheless, I think that far more than most of us realize it runs in human blood to shed itself for humanity when the occasion calls. I suspect that there is a little parcel of heroism put up with almost every new soul, wich survives the crowding of ordinary petty selfishness, and is rarely eliminated altogether, except by years of calculating porcinity. It is strong stuff, and curiously capable of sudden expansion, so that as long as any of it is left, there is always a risk that it will swell out all in an unexpected moment, crowd calculation to the wall, and boss the job in hand.—[Harper’s Weekly.