The Project Gutenberg EBook of Report on Surgery to the Santa Clara County
Medical Society, by Joseph Bradford Cox

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Title: Report on Surgery to the Santa Clara County Medical Society

Author: Joseph Bradford Cox

Release Date: December 8, 2007 [EBook #23769]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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REPORT
ON
SURGERY
TO THE
SANTA CLARA COUNTY
MEDICAL SOCIETY.

BY
J. BRADFORD COX, M. D.

_READ MARCH 2d, 1880._

SAN JOSE:
MERCURY STEAM PRINT.
1880.

REPORT ON SURGERY.

In presenting this report I will not attempt to give any historical data
connected with the subject of surgery, since that has been ably done in
the report of last year.

I shall assume, and that without hesitation, that surgery is a science,
properly so-called. That it is an art, is also true. But what is science?
What is art? Science is knowledge. Art the application of that knowledge.
To be more explicit, science is the knowledge we possess of nature and her
laws; or, more properly speaking, God and His laws.

When we say that oxygen and iron unite and form ferric oxide, we express a
law of matter: that is, that these elements have an _affinity_ for each
other. A collection of similar facts and their systematic arrangement, we
call chemistry. Or we might say, chemistry is the science or knowledge of
the elementary substances and their laws of combination.

When we say that about one-eighth of the entire weight of the human body
is a fluid, and is continually in motion within certain channels called
blood vessels, we express a law of life, or a vital process. When we say
this fluid is composed of certain anatomical elements, as the plasma, red
corpuscles, leucocytes an