Progress Report

Looking backward last week over the progress of medicine in the first half of the 20th Century, both the Journal of the American Medical Association and the British Medical Journal found reasons for cheering. But on one point they differed sharply. Said the A.M.A. Journal: "Operations formerly undreamed of are now everyday occurrences." On the contrary, said British Surgeon Geoffrey Jefferson: "There is not much that we do today that surgeons were not doing [in 1900]; we do things better and more often . . . We have new aids that they were denied"--such as wound-healing drugs and better anesthetics.

Looking ahead, the editors of the London Journal saw surgery losing its importance: "Sulphonamides and antibiotics are making themselves mercifully felt as alternatives to the knife and the probe. Should . . . a medical remedy be found for cancer . . . if not in the next 50 years, at least within an imaginable span of time, the torchbearers of surgery will illuminate only that narrow field offered by injury to the body. In the medical millennium there will be only one kind of surgery--traumatic surgery."

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