Evening Republican, Volume 15, Number 95, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 21 April 1911 — FUTURE SURGERY CURES [ARTICLE]

FUTURE SURGERY CURES

Boston Expert Says the Blind Will Yet See and Womout Hearts Will Be Repaired. Boston.—Dr. Maurice H. Richardson. the noted surgeon, took a very optimistic view of the future of his ' profession in a talk given in the Harvard medical school series of popular free lectures, when he said possibly the surgeon may yet be able to give sight to the blind, to furnish hearing for the deaf, and even to give new life to a heart that has nearly stopped beating from valvular obstruction. He also hinted that it is not impossible that some day healthy human kidneys may by some sort of cold storage or other preservative means he kept till needed, and then substituted by a surgeon for the worn-out and useless kidneys of some patient, who may then recover. He said that whereas cancer is always curable by the surgeon, if he have the opportunity early enough, not one in 50 cases of cancer of the stomach and not one in 160 of certain other kinds of internal cancer reach the knowledge of the surgeon early ‘enough to save the sufferer. The one thing above all others that has hitherto defied the surgeon, he said, has been obstruction of the circulation of the blood, located in either the arteries or in the valves of the heart, but ! the wonderful things accomplished by Dr. Carre* In New York by putting a damp on the heart, the speaker believed, open up a wonderful vista of possibilities for the future of surgery j i|f some war can he found to clear j iout an obstructed valve, be asserted, j

a man who finds it almost impossible to mount one flight of stairs would be Just as well as anybody else as soon as the obstruction to his blood circulation was removed. An interesting statement by Dr. Richardson was that cancer on the lip is quite common and is largely due to smoking a clay pipe, the stem of which sticks to the lip and removes a portion of the membrane, forming the seat of the cancer. Cigarette smoking may also cause cancer on the lip, owing to the tendency of the paper to stick to the lip.