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It maps the whole surface of the body into an arbitrary number of regions, and studies each region successively from the surface to the bone, or beneath it. This hardly deserves the name of a science, although Velpeau has dignified it with that title, but it furnishes an admirable practical way for the surgeon who has to operate on a particular region of the body to study that region.
As soon as Doctor Velpeau had gone, the Duke of Hereward went up stairs to see his wife, and, sitting by the lounge on which she still reclined, he told her of the urgent business that required his immediate departure for Algiers. "Algiers!
"Now that I look well at you, I see that you are tired. A very little exertion seems to fatigue you now, Valerie. I do not understand your condition. It makes me anxious. I have asked Velpeau to call and see you. He will look in this afternoon."
Velpeau mentions a fork which was passed from the anus twenty months after it was swallowed. Wilson mentions an instance of gastrotomy which was performed for the extraction of a fork swallowed sixteen years before. There is an interesting case in which, in a delirium of typhoid fever, a girl of twenty-two swallowed two iron forks, which were subsequently expelled through an abdominal abscess.
"It must be as I thought," said the duke to himself; "all this eccentricity, this nervous irritability has a natural cause, and not an alarming one, and it must be humored." "Will you keep your promise?" she testily inquired. "Certainly, my dear child. Anything to please you. You will see Velpeau this afternoon.
His example may be an encouragement to some of my younger hearers who are born, not with the silver spoon in their mouths, but with the two-tined iron fork in their hands. It is a poor thing to take up their milk porridge with in their young days, but in after years it will often transfix the solid dumplings that roll out of the silver spoon. So Velpeau found it.
John Degrass, of New York city, named in another place, spent two years in Paris Hospitals, under the teaching of the great lecturer and master of surgery, Velpeau, to whom he was assistant and dresser, in the hospital the first position for advantages, held by a student.
And yet three years after the declaration of Velpeau, and four years before the statement of Sir Benjamin Brodie, the young Georgia physician had removed a tumor from the neck of a patient, and that patient had felt no pain. The story is very interesting. Dr. Crawford W. Long was born in Danielsville, Madison County, Ga., on the 1st of November, 1815.
In 1839, Velpeau of Paris declared that the attempts to find some agent by which to prevent pain in surgical operations was nothing less than chimerical; and as late as 1846 Sir Benjamin Brodie said, "Physicians and surgeons have been looking in vain, from the days of Hippocrates down to the present time, for the means of allaying or preventing bodily pain."
The name of Velpeau must have reached many of you, for he died in 1867, and his many works made his name widely known. Coming to Paris in wooden shoes, starving, almost, at first, he raised himself to great eminence as a surgeon and as an author, and at last obtained the Professorship to which his talents and learning entitled him.
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