Merits
Robert Morris has a quite impressive list of merits he accomplished during his career as a surgeon. First of all while at the Bellevue Hospital he and Dr. Frase Fuller, a surgeon of another Division, had performed the very first cases of wiring of simple fracture of the patella that had been done in the United States, and probably in the world. In those days this type of operation would be considered non-sense and inappropriate, since the idea of opening an uninfected knee joint was mad, because it would have certainly lead to a disaster, like an infection.
He developed a method for palpation of the appendix and published a report upon the subject.
He made up a method consisting in wound repairing through the agency of a moist blood clot, which became known and adopted in the world over as Schede method. Dr. Max Schede was indeed the one who decided to carry out this method in a number of different cases, after seeing Morris' demonstration, and he finally published a report upon this plan of procedure in the Deutzsche Medizinische Wochenschrift, 1886.
Morris made some experimenting with grafting of ovaries in rabbits. In his notes he recorded a frequent trouble in the effort to make one set of rabbits immune to blood serum of another set of rabbits. The main issue was that tissue of any sort taken from one individual and planted in another is physiologically a stranger. The subject of gland grafting engaged his interest in the Nineties. He also noticed that ovarian grafting was so much more frequently possible than testis grafting, first of all because of the number of women donors, which he reported were much more ready than men to sacrifice a solid organ.
He performed the first human ovarian grafting in 1895. and so he published the same year a presentation of his idea of gland grafting, description of technique and a report upon cases. And in May 1906 he published a great report of the birth of a living child after heteroplastic ovarian grafting in the New York Medical Record. After this report, he received tons of letters from women who had lost their ovaries and wished to have a gland grafting. Some of them would offer a contingent fee, condition that Morris had never accepted, since he thought that such a fee would presuppose a work for the money regardless of the rendering of human service.
Moreover he was one of the founders of The American Society of Endocrinologists. Furthermore he adopted early intervention for appendicitis in 1890, and wrote about its treatment.
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Famous quotes containing the word merits:
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—Frances Burney (1752–1840)
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—Ben Hecht (1893–1964)
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—Susan B. Anthony (1820–1906)