Fifty Years a Surgeon
by
[Dutton, $3.50]
HERE is a volume of some 350 pages with twenty-four chapters in most attractive form. It is the autobiography of an eminently successful metropolitan surgeon who has received well-merited rewards, not only financial, but in terms of honor and position, together with a statement of his ideas on certain moot subjects concerning which there is much diversity of opinion within the medical profession and without.
The first ten chapters and the last two are strictly biographical in nature, with such attractive titles us ‘Youth and the Call to Medicine,’ ‘Medical School of the Eighties,’ ‘Interning at Bellevue,’ ‘The Doctor of the Eighties,’ ‘I Decided to Specialize,’ ‘I Practice Surgery,’ and finally, — and by all means the most absorbing chapters to this reviewer at least, — ‘The Red Gods’ and ‘The Long Stillwater.’ These, with Dr. Morris’s vivid description of the changes in the technique of surgery which have taken place in his time, should be fascinating reading both to the physician and to the layman. The remaining chapters are somewhat controversial, and discuss subjects which might well have been reserved for a separate volume for the medical profession alone. The chapter on gland-grafting, for instance, represents a branch of medicine which is distinctly in its infancy and in the experimental stage, and which after all, at the present at least, does not quite deserve the importance which Dr. Morris gives it. Likewise, when he discusses in one chapter psychoanalysis and metaphysics, a physician reading this book might well ask, ‘Why does not the shoemaker stick to his last?’ It is hard for one to conceive how a man who has devoted his life to surgery, to the exclusion of other tilings, can speak with any particular authority on such difficult and special subjects. The same might apply to the next chapter, ‘Sex and Birth Control.’ There are many who would disagree radically with his ideas on this subject. Of all topics this is perhaps the most controversial one that exists in medicine and elsewhere at the present time. One cannot but feel that it is a little out of place here.
His attitude toward the general practitioner is a very fine one, a little bit in contrast, perhaps, to that of Dr. Hugh Cabot, who in his recent book apparently feels that the young man in general practice, well trained and equipped with recent knowledge, does nothing but sit and wait for patients who do not come, while the older man is too overcrowded with patients to do good work.
Whenever he reads a medical autobiography of this sort the reviewer, unconsciously perhaps, compares it with that finest of all such volumes, The Autobiography of Edward Livingston Trudeau, which has a modesty, a simplicity, and a sweetness which are rarely found elsewhere. Certain chapters of Dr. Morris’s book come up to this high standard, but there are other chapters which to the reviewer leave a rather unpleasant taste and which he feels might well have been omitted. He admits frankly, however, that he enjoyed reading the book, although differing with various medical opinions therein expressed.
JOHN B. HAWES 2ND