Truth, trust, and confidence in surgery, 1890-1910: Patient autonomy, communication, and consent

Bulletin of the History of Medicine

Volumn 83, Issue 2, 2009, Pages 302-330

  Wilde, Sally ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF QUEENSLAND   (Australia)

Author keywords

Doctor patient relationship; History; History of informed consent; Patient autonomy; Surgery

Indexed keywords

ARTICLE; ATTITUDE TO HEALTH; AUSTRALIA AND NEW ZEALAND; DOCTOR PATIENT RELATION; ETHICS; GENERAL SURGERY; HISTORY; HUMAN; INFORMED CONSENT; INTERPERSONAL COMMUNICATION; PEER GROUP; PERSONAL AUTONOMY; TRUST; UNITED KINGDOM;

AUSTRALASIA; COMMUNICATION; GENERAL SURGERY; GREAT BRITAIN; HEALTH KNOWLEDGE, ATTITUDES, PRACTICE; HISTORY, 19TH CENTURY; HISTORY, 20TH CENTURY; HUMANS; INFORMED CONSENT; PEER GROUP; PERSONAL AUTONOMY; PHYSICIAN-PATIENT RELATIONS; TRUST; TRUTH DISCLOSURE;

EID: 68149148660     PISSN: 00075140     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (115)

1. Christopher Lawrence, "Democratic, Divine and Heroic: the History and Historiography of Surgery," in Medical Theory, Surgical Practice, ed. Christopher Lawrence (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 1-47;
2. Thomas Schlich, "The Emergence of Modern Surgery," in Medicine Transformed: Health, Disease and Society in Europe 1800-1930, ed. Deborah Brunton (Manchester, U.K.: Open University Press, 2004), pp. 61-91;
3. Ulrich Tröhler, "Surgery (Modern)," in Companion Encyclopedia of the History of Medicine, 2 vols., ed. W. F. Bynum and Roy Porter (London: Routledge, 1997), 2: 984-1007.
4. Ulrich Tröhler, "'To Operate or not to Operate?' Scientific and Extraneous Factors in Therapeutical Controversies Within the Swiss Society of Surgery 1913-1988," Clio Medica, 1991, 22: 89-113.
5. For the impact of practice on results a generation later, see Sally Wilde, "See One, Do One, Modify One: Prostate Surgery in the 1930s," Med. Hist., 2004, 48: 351-66. In the period covered by this paper, there was virtually no formal postgraduate training in surgery, and surgeons learned from experience: Sally Wilde, "Practising Surgery, A History of Surgical Training in Australia 1927-1974" (Ph.D. thesis, University of Melbourne, 2003). For the United States,
6. see: Dale C. Smith, "Appendicitis, Appendectomy, and the Surgeon," Bull. Hist. Med., 1996, 70: 414-41.
7. Lindsay Granshaw, "'Upon This Principle I Have Based a Practice': the Development and Reception of Antisepsis in Britain, 1867-90," in Medical Innovations in Historical Perspective, ed. John V. Pickstone (Basingstoke, U.K.: Macmillan, 1992);
8. T. H. Pennington, "Listerism, its Decline and its Persistence: The Introduction of Aseptic Surgical Techniques in Three British Teaching Hospitals, 1890-99," Med. Hist., 1995, 39: 35-60; Jerry L. Gaw, A Time to Heal: The Diffusion of Listerism in Victorian Britain (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1999).
9. Owsei Temkin, "The Role of Surgery in the Rise of Modern Medical Thought," Bull. Hist. Med., 1951, 25: 248-59; Schlich, "Modern Surgery" (n. 1).
10. W. F. Bynum, Science and the Practice of Medicine in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994);
11. John Harley Warner, "The History of Science and the Sciences of Medicine," Osiris, 1995, 10: 164-93;
12. A. Cunningham and P. William, eds., The Laboratory Revolution in Medicine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
13. Kevin White has argued that the importance of science in validating medicine has been oversimplified: K. N. White, "Negotiating Science and Liberalism: Medicine in Nineteenth-Century South Australia," Med. Hist., 1999, 43: 173-91;
14. see also Ian A. Burney, Bodies of Evidence: Medicine and the Politics of the English Inquest, 1830-1926 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000). On some of the complexities surrounding the adoption of anesthesia and antisepsis/asepsis, see: Michael Worboys, Spreading Germs: Disease Theories and Medical Practice in Britain, 1865-1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), esp. ch. 3 and 5; Margaret Pelling, "The Meaning of Contagion: Reproduction, Medicine and Metaphor," in Contagion, Historical and Cultural Studies, ed. Alison Bashford and Claire Hooker (London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 15-38.
15. For the possible contribution of nutrition to surgical outcomes, see David Hamilton, "The Nineteenth-Century Surgical Revolution-Antisepsis or Better Nutrition?" Bull. Hist. Med., 1982, 56: 30-40. The changing virulence of organisms may also have played a role: Irvine Loudon, Death in Childbirth: An International Study of Maternal Care and Maternal Mortality 1800-1950 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992);
16. Anna Greenwood, "Lawson Tait and Opposition to Germ Theory: Defining Science in Surgical Practice," J. Hist. Med., 1998, 53: 99-113.
17. Jay Katz, The Silent World of Doctor and Patient (New York: The Free Press, 1984; repr., Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), p. 1; idem, "Disclosure and Consent in Psychiatric Practice: Mission Impossible?" in Law and Ethics in the Practice of Psychiatry, ed. Charles K. Hofling (New York: Brunner/Mazel, 1980), pp. 91-117; R. R. Faden, T. L. Beauchamp, et al., A History and Theory of Informed Consent (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); Martin S. Pernick, "The Patient's Role in Medical Decision-Making: A Social History of Informed Consent in Medical Therapy," in Making Health Care Decisions: The Ethical and Legal Implications of Informed Consent in the Patient-Practitioner Relationship, 3 vols. (New York: President's Commission for the Study of Ethical Problems in Medicine and Biomedical and Behavioral Research, 1982), 3: 1-36; see Appendices, Studies on the Foundations of Informed Consent.
18. Pernick, "Informed Consent" (n. 9), pp. 10-12.
19. Faden, Beauchamp, et al., A History of Informed Consent (n. 9), pp. 53-56. Of course, it is often impossible to tell whether modern "informed consent" meets the Faden/Beauchamp definition, either.
20. Ibid., pp. 56-60.
21. Nancy Tomes, A Generous Confidence: Thomas Story Kirkbride and the Art of Asylum-Keeping, 1840-1883 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984); Judith Walzer Leavitt, Brought to Bed: Childbearing in America, 1750-1950 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); Regina Morantz-Sanchez, "Negotiating Power at the Bedside: Historical Perspectives on Nineteenth-Century Patients and their Gynaecologists," Fem. Stud., 2000, 26: 287-309.
22. Irvine Loudon, "The Concept of the Family Doctor," Bull. Hist. Med., 1984, 58: 347-62;
23. Anne Digby, Making a Medical Living: Doctors and Patients in the English Market, 1720-1911 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994);
24. idem, The Evolution of British General Practice, 1850-1948 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999);
25. Tomes, A Generous Confidence (n. 13); Regina Morantz-Sanchez, Conduct Unbecoming a Woman: Medicine on Trial in Turn-of-the-Century Brooklyn (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999);
26. idem, "Negotiating Power," (n. 13); Walzer Leavitt, Brought to Bed (n. 13).
27. Sally Wilde, "The Elephants in the Doctor-Patient Relationship," Health History, 2007, 9: 1-26; Nancy Theriot, "Negotiating Illness: Doctors, Patients and Families in the Nineteenth Century," J. Hist. Behav. Sci., 2001, 37: 349-68.
28. Christopher Crenner, Private Practice in the Early Twentieth-Century Medical Office of Dr. Richard Cabot (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005);
29. Nancy M. Theriot, "Women's Voices in Nineteenth-Century Medical Discourse: A Step Towards Deconstructing Science," Signs, 1993, 19: 1-31; Kathleen E. Powderly, "Patient Consent and Negotiation in the Brooklyn Gynecological Practice of Alexander J. C. Skene: 1863-1900," J. Med. Philos., 2000, 25: 12-27;
30. David G. Schuster, "Personalizing Illness and Modernity: S. Weir Mitchell, Literary Women and Neurasthenia, 1870-1914," Bull. Hist. Med., 2005, 79: 695-722.
31. Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1963; London: Routledge, 2003).
32. Ibid., p. 101.
33. Erwin Ackerknecht, Medicine at the Paris Hospital, 1794-1848 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967); for an overview of the debates on the importance of early nineteenth-century Paris, see Caroline Hannaway and Ann La Berge, eds., Constructing Paris Medicine, Clio Medica, vol. 50 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998).
34. Digby, The Evolution of British General Practice (n. 14); Crenner, Private Practice (n. 16).
35. Jukes de Styrap, A Code of Medical Ethics, With General and Special Rules for the Guidance of the Faculty and the Public in the Complex Relations of Professional Life (London, 1878; repr., London: H. K. Lewis, 1890), p. 396.
36. Ibid., pp. 396-98.
37. Edward B. Angell, "The Modern Hospital: Its Value to the Patient and to the Physician," Am. J. Nurs., 1901, 1: 703-12, p. 707.
38. Keir Waddington, "Unsuitable Cases: the Debate Over Outpatient Admissions, the Medical Profession and Late-Victorian London Hospitals," Med. Hist., 1998, 42: 26-46; "Hospital Abuse: Conference in Birmingham," Lancet, 1890, 136: 162-63; "Hospitals: Their Use and Abuse," Lancet, 1890, 136: 1207.
39. Fees for the hospital itself (in addition to those charged by the doctor and the anesthetist) varied but were usually two or more guineas a week. See, for example, The Women's Cooperative Guild, Maternity, Letters from Working-Women (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1915; repr. in The English Working Class, ed. Standish Meacham, New York: Garland Publishing, 1980), letter 95, pp. 119-22.
40. Wilde, "The Elephants in the Doctor-Patient Relationship" (n. 15).
41. Ibid.; Joel D. Howell, Technology in the Hospital: Transforming Patient Care in the Early Twentieth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995); Charles Rosenberg, The Care of Strangers: The Rise of America's Hospital System (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987).
42. Alexander MacCormick, "Case of Pylorectomy," Australas. Med. Gaz., 1892, 11: 1-4, p. 1.
43. Journals consulted include BMJ, 1889, 1890, and 1900; Lancet, 1890 and 1900; Australas. Med. Gaz., 1890-93, 1895, 1898, 1900, and 1901; Intercolonial Medical Journal of Australasia, 1898, 1899, 1900, and 1901; Nancy Theriot, "Negotiating Illness" (n. 15); and Steven M. Stowe, "Seeing Themselves at Work: Physicians and the Case Narrative in the Mid-Nineteenth-Century American South," in Sickness and Health in America, ed. Judith Walzer Leavitt and Ronald L. Numbers (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978), pp. 161-86. For the use of unpublished case records, see: John Harley Warner, "The Uses of Patient Records by Historians-Patterns, Possibilities and Perplexities," Health History, 1999, 1: 101-11; J. McCalman, "Writing the Women's Hospital History with Medical Records," Health History, 1999, 1: 132-38; Guenter B. Risse and John Harley Warner, "Reconstructing Clinical Activities: Patient Records in Medical History," Soc. Hist. Med., 1992, 5: 183-205.
44. Surgeons' Case Books, Middlesex Hospital, Archives of University College London Hospital, London (hereafter Middlesex Hospital Archives); Brisbane Hospital, Patient Charts 8.1.1900-10.5.1900, RSI 3806, Queensland State Archives, Brisbane.
45. R. Hamilton Russell, "Chronic Intestinal Obstruction Following Injury: Laparotomy," BMJ, 1890, 1: 1296-97.
46. Ibid., p. 1297.
47. Crenner, Private Practice (n. 16); Theriot, "Women's Voices" (n. 16); Powderly, "Patient Consent" (n. 16); Schuster, "Personalizing Illness" (n. 16).
48. A. H. Fieldstad, "Papilloma Laryngis-Operation, Recurrence- Operation, Cure," Australas. Med. Gaz., 1892, 11: 27.
49. James Graham, "Twisting of the Pedicle in Ovarian Tumors, with Notes of Two Cases," Australas. Med. Gaz., 1892, 11: 4-6. Graham's reference to the patient's friends was common practice: Wilde, "The Elephants in the Doctor-Patient Relationship" (n. 15).
50. Graham, "Twisting of the Pedicle" (n. 35), p. 6.
51. Leonard M. Bickle, "Epithelioma of Lip," Australas. Med. Gaz., 1892, 11: 158-59.
52. L. Davenport Parry, "A Complicated Case of Traumatic Axillary Aneurism," Australas. Med. Gaz., 1890-91, 10: 78-79. This was a case in New South Wales.
53. R. A. Stirling, "Surgical Operations at the Melbourne Hospital During the Six Months from April to October 1897," Intercolonial Medical Journal of Australasia, 1898, 3: 17-28, p. 25.
54. Brisbane Hospital, Patient Charts 8.1.1900-10.5.1900, RSI 3806, p. 992, Queensland State Archives, Brisbane.
55. The Middlesex Hospital Reports of the Medical, Surgical and Pathological Registrars for the Year Ended 1896, Middlesex Hospital Archives.
56. Editorial, "The Right to Perform Operations in Hospitals," BMJ, 1890, 1: 496-97, p. 496.
57. Ibid., p. 497.
58. G. A. Fischer, "Otitic Septic Sinus Thrombosis, Radical Operation, Ligation, and Excision of Internal Jugular Vein-Cure," Australas. Med. Gaz., 1900, 19: 104-7, p. 105.
59. B. Poulton, "Notes on a Case of Tubal Pregnancy-Rupture-Operation- Death," Australas. Med. Gaz., 1890-91, 10: 144.
60. There is a hint of the extent to which doctors were prepared to go in an attempt to obtain consent (in this case for a post mortem rather than surgery) in the following note about a fatal case of intussusception in Sydney in 1891: "I regret to say that neither soft talk nor bribery prevailed upon the parents to give permission to a post mortem." Dr. Newmarch, "A Case of Acute Intussusception-Death," Australas. Med. Gaz., 1890-91, 10: 117.
61. MacCormick, "Pylorectomy" (n. 28), p. 1.
62. Ibid.
63. Sir William Stokes, "Remarks on Pylorectomy," BMJ, 1890, 1: 997.
64. W. Anstey Giles, "A Case of Partial Laryngectomy," Australas. Med. Gaz., 1892, 11: 130-31.
65. Wilde, "See One, Do One" (n. 3).
66. E. Todd, "Statistics of Abdominal Operations at Adelaide Hospital During Eleven Years from January 1, 1885 to December 31, 1895," Transactions of the Fourth Session of the Intercolonial Medical Congress of Australasia, Dunedin, New Zealand, February 1896 (Dunedin: Otago Daily Times, 1897), pp. 173-88. Another 30 percent of the operations were for hydatids, a particular Australasian problem. For hydatid disease in another area where dogs, sheep, and humans lived closely together, see Guenter B. Risse, "Glimpses of a Hidden Burden: Hydatid Disease in Eighteenth-Century Scotland," Bull. Hist. Med., 2005, 79: 534-43.
67. Ann Dally, Women Under the Knife: A History of Surgery (New York: Routledge, 1992); Ornella Moscucci, The Science of Woman: Gynaecology and Gender in England, 1800-1929 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Ludmilla Jordanova, Sexual Visions: Images of Gender in Science and Medicine Between the Eighteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989); Morantz-Sanchez, Conduct Unbecoming (n. 14).
68. Moscucci, The Science (n. 53), esp. ch. 5, "The Unsexing of Women."
69. Lawrence D. Longo, "The Rise and Fall of Battey's Operation," Bull. Hist. Med., 1979, 53: 244-67, p. 246. Amenorrhea is abnormal or suppressed menstruation.
70. Ibid.
71. Mr. Meredith, "Address to the Medical Society of London, Monday April 4th, 1890, On the Present Position of Abdominal Surgery," BMJ, 1890, 1: 896-900, p. 896.
72. Minutes of the Medical Committee of the Middlesex Hospital, 7 March 1891-22 October 1892, p. 5, Middlesex Hospital Archives.
73. For example, see: The Middlesex Hospital Reports of the Medical, Surgical and Pathological Registrars for the Year Ended 1890, "Appendix: Laparotomy, Summary of Cases from the Gynaecological Ward and Summary of Cases from the Surgical Wards," Middlesex Hospital Archives.
74. C. E. Todd, "A Case of Cholecystotomy with Very Large Stones," Australas. Med. Gaz., 1892, 11: 82-83, p. 83.
75. In 1892, for instance, the chloroformist at the Middlesex Hospital resigned, following an inquest on a death under anesthetic: Minutes of the Medical Committee of the Middlesex Hospital, 7 March 1891-22 October 1892, p. 177, Middlesex Hospital Archives.
76. See also Surgeon Major E. Lawrie, "Hyderabad Chloroform Commission and Professor Wood's Address on Anaesthesia at Berlin," Lancet, 1890, 136: 1143-45; Sir T. Spencer Wells, "Modern Abdominal Surgery," BMJ, 1890, 2: 1413-16. By August 1890, the editors of the Lancet had decided that "no operation requiring an anaesthetic should be undertaken, save under the most urgent circumstances, without the presence of two or more duly qualified surgeons": "Editorial," Lancet, 1890, 136: 457.
77. Burney, Bodies of Evidence (n. 7).
78. D. Zuck, "Mr. Troutbeck as the Surgeon's Friend: The Coroner and the Doctors-An Edwardian Comedy," Med. Hist., 1995, 39: 259-87.
79. Minutes of the Medical Committee of the Middlesex Hospital, 7 March 1891-22 October 1892, p. 108, Middlesex Hospital Archives.
80. Greg Watters and David Walker, "Surgical Accountability in the 1880s: the Death of Susan Nixon," Aust. N. Z. J. Surg., 2005, 75: 719-22; Frank Forster, "Early Australian Ovariotomies and the Men who Performed Them," in Australia's Quest for Colonial Health: Some Influences on Early Health and Medicine in Australia, ed. John Pearn and Catherine O'Carrigan (Brisbane: Royal Children's Hospital, 1983), pp. 117-121.
81. This is a very early occurrence of the concept of special qualification being required for surgery, as opposed to the generalist qualification of a doctor: Watters and Walker, "Surgical Accountability" (n. 65), p. 720.
82. K. S. Inglis, Hospital and Community, A History of the Royal Melbourne Hospital (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1958), esp. ch. 2; David M. O'Sullivan, "The Introduction of Antiseptic Surgery to Australia," in Papers Presented at a Seminar on the History of Medicine 13-15 April 1967, Department of Medical History, University of Melbourne (Sydney: Australasian Medical Publishing Co., 1968), pp. 78-94.
83. O'Sullivan, "The Introduction" (n. 67), p. 93; Youl's rhetoric also seems to have been informed by the debate about "hospitalism," and the ideas surrounding the critique of the Melbourne Hospital did not by any means represent a straightforward acceptance of germ theory. See Inglis, Hospital and Community (n. 67) and Worboys, Spreading Germs (n. 7).
84. E. Sandford Jackson, "An Address," Med. J. Aust., 1926, 2: 855-56.
85. See, for example, the editorial, "The Law and Equity of Attacks on Medical Practitioners," BMJ, 1890, 1: 307-8.
86. For Britain and accusations of "human vivisection" and experimenting on patients, see Burney, Bodies of Evidence (n. 7), ch. 5.
87. Editorial, "Batchelor v. Gore," Australas. Med. Gaz., 1892, 11: 136-37.
88. See, for example, Editorial, "An Unqualified Practitioner Convicted of Manslaughter," BMJ, 1890, 2: 423; Philippa Martyr, Paradise of Quacks: An Alternative History of Medicine in Australia (Sydney: Macleay Press, 2002); Waltraud Ernst, ed., Plural Medicine, Tradition and Modernity, 1800-2000 (London: Routledge, 2002).
89. Editorial, "Cunneen v. Cooper," Australas. Med. Gaz., 1895, 14: 208-10.
90. Dr. Pratt, "Reply to Editorial, Cunneen v. Cooper," Australas. Med. Gaz., 1895, 14: 256-57. "The lad Cunneen" was awarded £400 and costs against Dr. Cooper for malpractice. The arm later healed. Thomas B. Walley, "Letter to the Editor," Australas. Med. Gaz., 1900, 19: 129.
91. George Lane Mullins, "The Duties and Responsibilities of Medical Practitioners in New South Wales," Australas. Med. Gaz., 1895, 14: 278-81, p. 278.
92. Charles MacLaurin, "Radical Cure of Inguinal Hernia, with an Account of a new Operation," Australas. Med. Gaz., 1900, 19: 380-82, p. 380.
93. Dr. Pinnock in discussion of J. O. Closs, "Hypertrophy of the Prostate," Transactions of the Fourth Session of the Intercolonial Medical Congress of Australasia, 1896 (Dunedin: Otago Daily Times, 1896), pp. 191-98, p. 198.
94. W. Moore, "Thiersch-Grafting," Intercolonial Medical Journal of Australasia, 1899, 4: 43-45.
95. Philip Tovey, Gary Easthope, and Jon Adams, eds., The Mainstreaming of Complementary and Alternative Medicine: Studies in Social Context (New York: Routledge, 2004).
96. For a recent overview of the debate initiated by McKeown on the relationship (or rather, lack thereof) between mortality decline and medical intervention, see Bernard Harris, "Public Health, Nutrition, and the Decline of Mortality: the McKeown Thesis Revisited," Social History of Medicine, 2004, 17: 379-407.
97. Pinnock, "Hypertrophy" (n. 78), p. 198.
98. See, for example, Robert Scott, "Presidential Address Delivered at the Annual Meeting of the Ballarat District Branch of the British Medical Association," Australas. Med. Gaz., 1900, 19: 48-54. For an earlier view on anesthesia, see Lawson Tait, "Address in Surgery," Lancet, 1890, 136: 220-24, esp. p. 222. Tait, it should be noted, remained a famous advocate of cleanliness rather than antisepsis.
99. Lawson Tait estimated the maternal mortality as 90-95 percent, unless cesarian section was followed by hysterectomy (Porro's operation): Lawson Tait, "An Address on the Surgical Aspect of Impacted Labour," BMJ, 1890, 1: 657-61.
100. Dr. Haward van Buren, "The Kensington Infirmary. A case of Caesarean Section- Death-Remarks," Lancet, 1890, 135: 646-47.
101. Ibid., p. 647.
102. Ibid.
103. Mr. Rivington, "The London Hospital, Cases of Operation for Disease of the Hip Joint in Which the Upper Epiphysis was Separated-Remarks," Lancet, 1890, 135: 900-902.
104. A. W. Mayo Robson, "Cases of Pelvic Abscess Treated by Abdominal Section," BMJ, 1890, 1: 944-47, p. 946.
105. Queensland Inquest files, Queensland State Archives, Brisbane; Jeremy A. Greene, "Therapeutic Infidelities: 'Noncompliance' Enters the Medical Literature," Soc. Hist. Med., 2004, 17: 327-43.
106. Annual Report of the Brisbane Hospital, 1916 (Brisbane, 1917), Fryer Collection, University of Queensland Library, Brisbane. This represented a rise from one operation for every 170 people in the Brisbane area to one in seventy-five. In Melbourne, the number of operations at St. Vincent's Hospital increased by nearly 1,000 percent between 1900 and 1930, while at the Melbourne Hospital, which did not treat children or, therefore, perform many tonsillectomies, the number of operations grew by about 500 percent. Annual Reports, St Vincent's Hospital Melbourne (Melbourne, 1893/4-1934/5); Melbourne Hospital, Report of the Committee of Management, with statement of accounts, list of subscribers and donors and statistical returns (Melbourne, 1902/3-1933/4). Copies of both series are held in the State Library of Victoria, Melbourne.
107. Gerald N. Grob, "The Rise and Decline of Tonsillectomy in Twentieth-Century America," J. Hist. Med. Allied Sci., 2007, 62: 383-421; in 1931, the first year that it was open, fully one-third of operations at the Mater Children's Hospital in Brisbane were for tonsils and adenoids: First Annual Report of the Mater Misericordiae Children's Public Hospital (Brisbane, 1932), pp. 18-20.
108. Grob, "The Rise and Decline" (n. 92); Smith, "Appendicitis" (n. 3).
109. This is in contrast with the United States, where appendectomy was already well established by this date: Smith, "Appendicitis" (n. 3). The much-publicized treatment of Edward VII's appendicitis in 1902 may have helped to persuade British and Australasian patients with acute abdominal pain that an operation might help them, and there was certainly an enormous increase in the number of appendectomies performed between 1900 and 1910.
110. G. H. Hopkins, "Some Remarks on Appendicitis," Australas. Med. Gaz., 1900, 19: 471.
111. Joseph L. Beeston, "Surgery of the Kidney-a Record of Twenty-two Cases," Australas. Med. Gaz., 1900, 19: 504.
112. G. Horace Naylor, "Three Cases in Surgical Private Practice in Auckland," Australas. Med. Gaz., 1900, 19: 329-31, p. 330.
113. Moore, "Thiersch-Grafting" (n. 79), p. 44.
114. "Patients refusing to obey the instructions of the Medical Officers will be immediately dismissed . . . Patients who conduct themselves in a disorderly manner, or do not conform strictly to the Rules, shall be discharged." Brisbane Hospital Committee, Annual Report and By-Laws, 1899, pp. 12, 18, Fryer Collection, University of Queensland Library, Brisbane.
115. Katz, The Silent World (n. 9), p. 1.