ABSTRACT
Surgeons who gave private lessons were usually attached to one of the large hospitals. Surgeons and “learned doctors” were separated by a wider gap in contemporary France than in any other country. The Academy had great importance for the rehabilitation of French surgery. At first, it consisted of the seventy leading “master-surgeons” in Paris. William Cheselden’s greatest passion was lithotomy, the removal of stones from the urinary bladder. Ancient surgical literature often mentioned lithotomy and the bladder-stone ailment, which was evidently quite common. The original method of removing such stones was “perineal lithotomy”. The perineal lithotomy was to outlast William Cheselden by centuries, and had champions even in the 1920s. The “Douglassian lithotomy”, introduced by John Douglas, was troublesome. It risked puncturing the peritoneum, or abdominal membrane, and even the intestine. The suprapubic lithotomy is a simple routine operation, whose proud traditions are shown by its conventional name: sectio alta the “high cut”.
