The old text-book description of typhlitis and perityphlitis is so similar to the description of the present day appendicitis that it is not necessary to reproduce it.  The symptoms given show conclusively that they are really one and the same.

In the surgical treatment of appendicitis the American profession has taken the lead, and the mention of this disease brings to mind such names as McBurney, whose name is given to an anatomical point—­McBurney’s Point—­midway between the right anterior superior spine of the ileum and the umbilicus, Deaver of Philadelphia, and Ochsner and Murphy of Chicago.  Those who are interested in the surgical treatment of the disease can look into the methods of these men, and many others.  The medical literature of the day abounds in exhaustive treatises on the subject of appendicitis and its surgical treatment.

We are living in an age that will not be properly recorded unless it be entered as The Age of Fads.

Following immediately on the announcement of Lord Lister’s antiseptic surgical dressing which rendered the invasion of the peritoneal cavity comparatively safe, came the laparotomy or celiotomy mania.  When it was discovered that opening the abdomen was really a minor operation, it was soon legitimatized by professional opinion, and rapidly became standardized as a necessary procedure in all questionable cases—­in all obscure cases of abdominal disease—­where the diagnosis was in doubt.  The result of popularizing and legitimatizing the exploratory incision, was to cause those who failed to resort to it, in doubtful eases, to be in contempt of the court of higher medical opinion, and to license those of a reckless, selfish, savage nature to play with human life in a manner and with a freedom that would make a barbarian envious.

The wave of abdominal operations that swept the country in the last quarter of the nineteenth century was appalling.  The slightest pain during menstruation, or in the lower abdomen, in fact every pain that a woman had from head to toes was put under arrest and forced to bear false witness against the ovaries.  It was a very easy matter to trump up testimony, when real evidence was embarrassing, to foregone conclusions; hence pains in obscure and foreign parts took on great importance when analyzed by minds drilled in the science of nervous reflexes, sympathies and metastases.

Normal ovariotomy (removing normal ovaries for a supposed reflex disease) swept the whole country during the eighties and threatened the unsexing of the entire female population.  The ovaries had the reputation of causing all the trouble that the flesh of woman was heir to.  Oophorectomy was the entering wedge, since then everything contained in the abdomen has become liable to extirpation on the slightest suspicion.

Those surgeons of greater dexterity or savagery, I can’t tell which, prided themselves in operating on the more difficult cases.  Taking the ovaries out was a very tame affair compared to removing the uterus, tubes and ovaries; hence the surgical adept embraced every opportunity for an excuse to remove everything that is femininely distinctive.