Progress of surgery seen by a good
medical teacher
February 8, 2017, 8:42 am
This launch of Volume 1 of the reprint of the
book, "Essentials of Surgery" by R. L. Spittel, FRCS. Eng. first
published in 1932 when he was a Surgeon at the General Hospital, Colombo, (now
The National Hospital of Sri Lanka) and Lecturer in Clinical Surgery, Ceylon
Medical College, (now The Medical Faculty, University of Colombo), together
with annotations by experts is timely and welcome. It gives the reader an
opportunity to appreciate the tremendous strides this discipline, and medicine
as a whole, has taken since.
The book was written in the pre-antibiotic era,
when viruses and genetics were unknown, when anaesthesia was in its infancy and
when the only imaging investigation available at that time was X-rays. His
objective was to present a concise alternative to larger textbooks, so that, as
stated in his preface, "if fundamental principles are thoroughly grasped
by the student, their application in diagnosis and treatment becomes a habit of
the mind, then the subject of surgery becomes both interesting and
simple". The book achieves this and more, displaying at the same time the
author’s attributes of a true scientist, a good doctor and surgeon, whose
practice was based on these foundations together with his skills as a good
medical teacher.
Some unique features
It displays his thorough command of the English
language combined with the romanticism of writers of fiction. He has the
license to use words such as "acuter, "commoner" and
"sapremia’, "keep the emunctories active", and the ability to
describe with uncanny precision "a patient violently intoxicated with
bacterial pus". The reader would appreciate further nuances in his graphic
descriptions of conditions and disease such as cellulitis, gangrene, the death
throes of a patient with tetanus, a passage of almost poetic content in
describing a patient with delirium tremens, etc. Most of the clinical states
throughout the book appear to be graphic details of the author’s own
observations which add a unique and authentic flavour to the teaching/ learning
process.
In what must be the only instance in medical
history, the author describes a case illustration of a patient with virulent
sepsis of the finger spreading up the arm, multiple surgeries, the suffering
("he begged that his arm be cut to tatters", "for the next four
days he hung between life and death", and his recovery. He recovered four
months later, with a residual ankylosed shoulder. The case was his own
experience with infection and near death!
There were no specialities at that time. General
surgeons also treated patients with Ear, Nose and Throat (ENT) problems,
Venereal diseases (Sexually Transmitted Infections), Orthopaedic problems,
Neurosurgical, Vascular, Urology, Leprosy and of course problems of surgical
Oncology. In addition to textbook descriptions of these conditions, the reader
would recognize and appreciate the author’s unique style of descriptive
talents.
How many ulcer clinics, not only in Sri Lanka,
but all over the world, need to be reminded, nay, blared to out aloud with this
statement "The actual destruction of germs in wounds is impossible with
antiseptics in strengths which will not cause actual destruction of tissue
cells, as germs are not all on the surface of the wound, but deeper in the
tissues". Nevertheless, there are easily over a hundred brands of
expensive products for "local treatment" of ulcers in the markets
today! He exhorts "gauze should never be pushed into discharging wounds
and sinuses for this is the most effective way of preventing pus from
escaping". The plugging of wounds with gauze is a common practice even
today, and numerous are the patients who have suffered septicaemia as a result,
ending in amputation or even death!
The next feature of this launch is the addition
of annotations to put the text into modern perspectives. "As
undergraduates, we were told that 50% of what we are teaching you today would
at some time in the future be proved to be wrong. The problem is that we do not
know which 50%!" Prof. Graham Taylor, Imperial College, London. A
discerning reader would readily note some of these, if not-all the errors, in
what were at that time in history, truisms in surgery. The annotations give
evidence based accounts of modern advances compiled by experts to give a
"modern twist" to this absorbing book.
It has been a fascinating journey and experience
reading the copy and the annotations and whilst thanking the authors, Dr
Lakshman Karalliedde and Dr. Philip Veerasingam, for giving me the luxury of
writing this foreword, I invite readers to go into this fascinating journey and
experience when reading the book.
A. H. Sheriffdeen
M.B.B.S. (Ceylon), F.R.C.S. (England), D.Sc.
(Honorary) University of Colombo. Emeritus Professor of Surgery,
University of Colombo.
