lth and strength, instead
of languishing in bed. Sayre, too, by his suspension treatment and the
plaster-of-Paris jacket, set the hunchback on his feet at a stage in his
disease in which before he had been forced to prolonged and painful
recumbency.

Although men professing special skill in certain operations, and
doubtless possessing it, flourished in old times, and left more or less
of their impress on the surgery of the present day, for that matter, it
was not until the second half of the Nineteenth Century that regional
surgery (which is what specialism virtually amounts to) was
systematically cultivated. Now there is hardly a portion of the body to
which practitioners who make its ailments a specialty do not direct
their searching methods of examination or on which they do not practise
their ingenious devices in the way of treatment. Specialism has always
been decried by a large section of the medical profession. On the other
hand, it has been and is still overrated by the laity. The true estimate
lies between the two. The specialists have advanced surgery immensely,
but, with many honorable exceptions, they have laid too much stress on
their several specialties, making too wide a range of ailments fall
within them. As for the community at large, their shortcoming lies in
the fact that most of them would seek for a specialist in mumps in case
that painful but transitory infliction were to come upon them, and in
their underrating of the family physician.

To change for a moment to a topic akin to the germ theory of disease,
the reader may be reminded that the antitoxine treatment of infectious
disease involves in almost every instance the use of some product
contained in the serum (that is to say, the watery part of the blood).
This leads to the subject of the use of natural and artificial serum in
the treatment of disease. To quote again from the article entitled, "The
Nineteenth Century in Medicine" ("New York Medical Journal," Dec.
29,1900): "It has been observed that the normal serum of certain animals
that are insusceptible to particular infectious diseases, if injected
into the human blood current or even into the subcutaneous tissue,
confers more or less of immunity against those diseases.... Artificial
serum seems to have been first employed by Edmund R. Peaslee as a benign
application to the peritonaeum in the operation of ovariotomy. His
conception of its mode of action is not very clear, but he was a ver