366. Surgery Without Pain

Surgery Without Pain

Mat_11:5 : ’93The blind receive their sight, and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear.’94

’93Doctor,’94 I said to a distinguished surgeon, ’93do you not get worn out with constantly seeing so many wounds and broken bones and distortions of the human body?’94 ’93Oh, no;’94 he answered, ’93all that is overcome by my joy in curing them.’94 A sublimer or more merciful art never came down from heaven than that of surgery. Catastrophe and disease entered the earth so early that one of the first wants of the world was a doctor. Our crippled and agonized human race called for surgeon and family physician for many years before they came. The first surgeons who answered this call were ministers of religion, namely, the Egyptian priests. And what a grand thing if all clergymen were also doctors, all D. D.’92s were M. D.’92s, for there are so many cases where body and soul need treatment at the same time, consolation and medicine, theology and therapeutics. As the first surgeons of the world were also ministers of religion, may these two professions always be in full sympathy! But under what disadvantages the early surgeons worked, from the fact that the dissection of the human body was forbidden, first by the pagans and then by the early Christians! Apes, being the brutes most like the human race, were dissected, but no human body might be unfolded for physiological and anatomical exploration, and the surgeons had to guess what was inside the temple by looking at the outside of it. If they failed in any surgical operation they were persecuted and driven out of the city, as was Archagathus because of his bold but unsuccessful attempt to save a patient.

But the world from the very beginning kept calling for surgeons, and their first skill is spoken of in Genesis, where they employed their art for the incisions of a sacred rite, God making surgery the predecessor of baptism; and we see it again in II Kings, where Ahaziah, the monarch, stepped on some cracked lattice-work in the palace, and it broke and he fell from the upper to the lower floor, and he was so hurt that he sent to the village of Ekron for aid; and Esculapius, who wrought such wonders of surgery that he was deified, and temples were built for his worship at Pergamos; and Epidaurus and Podelirius introduced for the relief of the world phlebotomy; and Damocedes cured the dislocated ankle of King Darius, and the cancer of his queen; and Hippocrates put successful hand on fractures, and introduced amputation; and Praxagoras removed obstructions; and Herophilus began dissection; and Erasistratus removed tumors; and Celsus, the Roman surgeon, removed cataract from the eye, and used the Spanish fly; and Heliodorus arrested disease of the throat; and Alexander of Tralles treated the eye; and Rhazas cauterized for the prevention of hydrophobia; and Percival Pott came to combat diseases of the spine; and in our own century we have had, among others, a Roux and a Larray in France, an Astley Cooper and an Abernethy in Great Britain, and a Valentine Mott and Willard Parker and Samuel D. Gross in America, and a galaxy of living surgeons as brilliant as their predecessors. What mighty progress in the baffling of disease since the crippled and sick of ancient cities were laid along the streets, that people who had ever been hurt or disordered in the same way might suggest what had better be done for the patients; and the priests of olden time, who were constantly suffering from colds received in walking barefoot over the temple pavements, had to prescribe for themselves, and fractures were considered so far beyond all human cure that instead of calling in the surgeon the people only invoked the gods!

But notwithstanding all the surgical and medical skill of the world, with what tenacity the old diseases hang on to the human race, and most of them are thousands of years old, and in our Bibles we read of them; the carbuncles of Job and Hezekiah; the palpitation of the heart spoken of in Deuteronomy; the sun-stroke of a child carried from the fields of Shunem, crying, ’93My head! my head!’94 King Asa’92s disease of the feet, which was nothing but gout; defection of teeth, that called for dental surgery, the skill of which, almost equal to anything modern, is still seen in the filled molars of the unrolled Egyptian mummies; the ophthalmia caused by the juice of the newly ripe fig, leaving the people blind at the roadside; epilepsy, as in the case of the young man often falling into the fire, and oft into the water; hypochondria, as of Nebuchadnezzar, who imagined himself an ox, and going out to the fields to pasture; the withered hand, which in Bible times, as now, came from the destruction of the main artery, or from paralysis of the chief nerve; the wounds of the man whom the thieves left for dead on the road to Jericho, and whom the good Samaritan nursed, pouring in oil and wine’97wine to cleanse the wound, and oil to soothe it. Thank God for what surgery has done for the alleviation and cure of human suffering!

But the world wanted a surgery without pain. Drs. Parre and Hickman and Simpson and Warner and Jackson, with their amazing genius, came on, and with their anaesthetics benumbed the patient with narcotics and ethers as the ancients did with hasheesh and mandrake, and quieted him for a while, but at the return of consciousness distress returned. The world has never seen but one surgeon who could straighten the crooked limb, cure the blind eye, or reconstruct the drum of a soundless ear, or reduce a dropsy, without any pain at the time, or any pain after, and that surgeon was Jesus Christ, the mightiest, grandest, gentlest, and most sympathetic surgeon the world ever saw, or ever will see; and He deserves the confidence and love and worship and hosanna of all the earth, and hallelujahs of all heaven. ’93The blind receive their sight, and the lame walk; the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear.’94

I notice this Surgeon had a fondness for chronic cases. Many a surgeon, when he has had a patient brought to him, has said: ’93Why was not this attended to five years ago? You bring him to me after all power of recuperation is gone. You have waited until there is a complete contraction of the muscles, and false ligatures are formed, and ossification has taken place. It ought to have been attended to long ago.’94 But Christ the Surgeon seemed to prefer inveterate cases. One was a hemorrhage of twelve years, and He stopped it. Another was a curvature of eighteen years, and He straightened it. Another was a cripple of thirty-eight years, and he walked out well. The eighteen-year patient was a woman bent almost double. If you could call a convention of all the surgeons of all the centuries, their combined skill could not cure that body so drawn out of shape. Perhaps they might stop it from getting any worse, perhaps they might contrive braces by which she might be made more comfortable, but it is, humanly speaking, incurable. Yet this divine Surgeon put both His hands on her, and from that doubled-up posture she began to rise, and the empurpled face began to take on a healthier hue, and the muscles began to relax from their rigidity, and the spinal column began to adjust itself, and the cords of the neck began to be more supple, and the eyes, that could see only the ground before, now looked into the face of Christ with gratitude, and up toward heaven in transport. Straight! After eighteen weary and exhausting years, straight! The poise, the gracefulness, the beauty of healthy womanhood reinstated. The thirty-eight years’92 case was a man who lay on a mattress near the mineral baths at Jerusalem. There were five apartments where lame people were brought, so that they could get the advantage of these mineral baths. The stone basin of the bath is still visible, although the waters have disappeared, probably through some convulsion of nature; the bath, one hundred and twenty feet long, forty feet wide, and eight feet deep. Ah, poor man; if you have been lame and helpless thirty-eight years, that mineral bath cannot restore you. Why, thirty-eight years is more than the average of human life! Nothing but the grave will cure you. But Christ the Surgeon walks along these baths, and I have no doubt passes by some patients who have been only six months disordered, or a year, or five years, and comes to the mattress of the man who had been nearly four decades helpless, and to this thirty-eight years’92 invalid said: ’93Wilt thou be made whole?’94 The question asked, not because the Surgeon did not understand the protractedness, the desperateness, of the case, but to evoke the man’92s pathetic narrative. ’93Wilt thou be made whole?’94 ’93Would you like to get well?’94 ’93Oh, yes,’94 says the man, ’93that is what I came to these mineral baths for; have tried everything. All the surgeons have failed, and all the prescriptions have proved valueless, and I got worse and worse, and I can neither move hand nor foot nor head. Oh, if I could only be free from this pain of thirty-eight years!’94 Christ, the Surgeon, could not stand that. Bending over the man on the mattress, and in a voice tender with all sympathy, but strong with all omnipotence, he says, ’93Rise!’94 And the invalid instantly scrambles to his knees, and then puts out his right foot, then his left foot, and then stood upright as though he had never been prostrated. While he stands looking at the Doctor, with a joy too much to hold, the Doctor says: ’93Shoulder this mattress! for you are not only well enough to walk, but well enough to work, and start out from these mineral baths. Take up thy bed and walk!’94 Oh, what a Surgeon for chronic cases then, and for chronic cases now!

This is not applicable so much to those who are only a little hurt of sin, and only for a short time, but to those prostrated of sin twelve years, eighteen years, thirty-eight years. Here is a Surgeon able to give immortal health. ’93Oh,’94 you say, ’93I am so completely overthrown and trampled down of sin that I cannot rise.’94 Are you flatter down than this patient at the mineral baths? No. Then rise. In the name of Jesus of Nazareth, the Surgeon who offers you his right hand of help, I bid thee rise. Not cases of acute sin, but of chronic sin’97those who have not prayed for thirty-eight years, those who have not been to church for thirty-eight years, those who have been gamblers, or libertines, or thieves, or outlaws, or blasphemers, or infidels, or atheists, or all these together, for thirty-eight years. A Christ for exigencies! A Christ for a dead-lift! A Surgeon who never loses a case!

In speaking of Christ as a surgeon, I must consider him as an oculist, or eye doctor, and an aurist, or ear doctor. Was there ever such another oculist? That he was particularly sorry for the blind folks, I take from the fact that the most of his works were with the diseased optic nerves. I have not time to count up the number of blind people mentioned who got his cure. Two blind men in one house, also one who was born blind; so that it was not removal of a visual obstruction, but the creation of the cornea, and ciliary muscle, and cystalline lens, and retina, and optic nerve, and tear gland; also the blind man of Bethsaida, cured by the saliva which the Surgeon took from the tip of his own tongue and put upon the eyelids; also two blind men who sat by the wayside. In our civilized lands we have blindness enough, the ratio fearfully increasing, according to the statement of Boston and New York and Philadelphia oculists, because of the reading of morning and evening newspapers on the jolting cars by the multitudes who live out of the city and come in to business. But in the lands where this Divine Surgeon operated, the cases of blindness were multiplied beyond everything by the particles of sand floating in the air, and the night dews falling on the eyelids of those who slept on the top of their houses; and in some of these lands it is estimated that twenty out of a hundred people are totally blind. Amid all that crowd of visionless people, what work for an oculist! And I do not believe that more than one out of a hundred of that Surgeon’92s cures were reported. He went up and down among those people who were feeling slowly their way by staff, or led by the hand of man or rope of dog, and introducing them to the faces of their own household, to the sunrise and the sunset, and the evening star. He just ran his hand over the expressionless face, and the shutters of both windows were swung open, and the restored went home, crying, ’93I see! I see! Thank God, I see!’94

That is the Oculist we all need. Till he touches our eyes we are blind. Yea, we were born blind. By nature we see things wrong if we see them at all. Our best eternal interests are put before us and we cannot see them. The glories of a loving and pardoning Christ are projected, and we do not behold them. Or we have a defective sight which makes the things of this world larger than the things of the future, time bigger than eternity. Or we are color-blind, and cannot see the difference between the blackness of darkness forever and the roseate morning of an everlasting day. But Christ the Surgeon comes in, and though we shrink back afraid to have him touch us, yet he puts his fingers on the closed eyelids of the soul, and midnight becomes midnoon; and we understand something of the joy of the young man of the Bible, who, though he had never before been able to see his hand before his face, now by the touch of Christ, had two headlights kindled under his brow, cried out in language that confounded the jeering crowd who were deriding the Christ that had effected the cure, and wanted to make him out a bad man, ’93Whether he be a sinner or no, I know not; one thing I know, that whereas I was blind, now I see.’94

But this Surgeon was just as wonderful as an aurist. Very few people have two good ears. Nine out of ten people are particular to get on this or that side of you when they sit or walk or ride with you, because they have one disabled ear. Many have both ears damaged, and what with the constant racket of our great cities, and the catarrhal troubles that sweep through the land, it is remarkable that there are any good ears at all. Most wonderful instrument is the human ear. It is harp and drum and telegraph and telephone and whispering-gallery all in one. So delicate and wondrous is its construction that the most difficult of all things to reconstruct is the auditory apparatus. The mightiest of scientists have put their skill to its retuning, and sometimes they stop the progress of its decadence, or remove temporary obstructions, but not more than one really deaf ear out of a hundred thousand is ever cured. It took a God to make the ear, and it takes a God to mend it. That makes me curious to see how Christ the Surgeon succeeds as an aurist.

We are told of only two cases he operated on as an ear surgeon. His friend Peter, naturally high-tempered, saw Christ insulted by a man by the name of Malchus, and Peter let his sword fly, aiming at the man’92s head, but the sword slipped and hewed off the outside ear, and our Surgeon touched the laceration and another ear bloomed in the place of the one that had been slashed away. But it is not the outside ear that hears. That is only a funnel for gathering sound and pouring it into the hidden and more elaborate ear. On the beach of Lake Galilee our Surgeon found a man deaf and dumb. The patient dwelt in perpetual silence, and was speechless. He could not hear a note of music or a clap of thunder. He could not call father or mother or wife or children by name. What power can waken that dull tympanum or reach that chain of small bones or revive that auditory nerve or open the gate between the brain and the outside world? The Surgeon put his fingers in the deaf ears and agitated them, and kept on agitating them until the vibration gave vital energy to all the dead parts, and they responded, and when our Surgeon withdrew his fingers from the ears, the two tunnels of sound were clear for all sweet voices of music and friendship. For the first time in his life he heard the dash of the waves of Galilee. Through the desert of painful silence had been built a king’92s highway of resonance and acclamation. But yet he was dumb. No word had ever leaped over his lip. Speech was chained under his tongue. Vocalization and accentuation were to him an impossibility. He could express neither love nor indignation nor worship. Our Surgeon, having unbarred his ear, will now unloose the shackle of his tongue. The Surgeon will use the same liniment or salve that he used on two occasions for the cure of blind people, namely, the moisture of his own mouth. The application is made. And lo, the rigidity of the dumb tongue is relaxed, and between the tongue and teeth were born a whole vocabulary, and words flew into expression. He not only heard but he talked. One gate of his body swung in to let sound enter, and the other gate swung out to let sound depart. Why is it that while other surgeons used knives and forceps and probes and spectroscopes, this Surgeon used only the ointment of his own lips? To show that all the curative power we ever feel comes straight from Christ. And if He touches us not, we shall be deaf as a rock and dumb as a tomb. Oh, thou greatest of all aurists, compel us to hear and help us to speak!

But what were the Surgeon’92s fees for all these cures of eyes and ears and tongues and withered hands and crooked backs? The skill and the painlessness of the operations were worth hundreds and thousands of dollars. Do not think that the cases he took were all moneyless. Did he not treat the nobleman’92s son? Did he not doctor the ruler’92s daughter? Did he not effect a cure in the house of a centurion of great wealth, who had out of his own pocket built a synagogue? They would have paid him large fees, and there were hundreds of wealthy people in Jerusalem, and among the merchant castles along Lake Tiberias, who would have given this Surgeon houses and lands and all they had for such cures as he could effect. For critical cases in our time great surgeons have received a thousand dollars, five thousand dollars, and, in one case I know of, fifty thousand dollars, but the Surgeon of whom I speak received not a shekel, not a penny, not a farthing. In his whole earthly life, we know of his having had but sixty-two and a half cents. When his taxes were due, by his omniscience he knew of a fish in the sea which had swallowed a piece of silver money, as fish are apt to swallow anything bright, and he sent Peter with a hook which brought up that fish, and from its mouth was extracted a Roman stater, or sixty-two and a half cents, the only money he ever had; and that he paid out for taxes. This greatest Surgeon of all the centuries gave all his services then, and offers all his services now, free of all charge. ’93Without money and without price’94 you may spiritually have your blind eyes opened, and your deaf ears unbarred, and your dumb tongues loosened, and your wounds healed, and your soul saved. If Christian people get hurt of body, mind, or soul, let them remember that surgery is apt to hurt, but it cures, and you can afford present pain for future glory. Beside that, there are powerful anaesthetics in the divine promises that soothe and alleviate. No ether or chloroform or cocaine ever made one so superior to distress as a few drops of that magnificent anodyne: ’93All things work together for good to those who love God;’94 ’93Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.’94

What a grand thing for our poor human race when this Surgeon shall have completed the treatment of all the world’92s wounds! The day will come when there will be no more hospitals, for there will be no more sick, and no more eye and ear infirmaries, for there will be no more blind or deaf, and no more deserts, for the round earth shall be brought under arboriculture, and no more blizzards or sunstrokes, for the atmosphere will be expurgated of scorch and chill, and no more war, for the swords shall come out of the foundry bent into pruning hooks; while in the heavenly country we shall see the victims of accident or malformation, or hereditary ills on earth, become the athletes in Elysian fields. Who is that man with such brilliant eyes close before the throne? Why, that is the man who, near Jericho, was blind, and our Surgeon cured his ophthalmia! Who is that erect and graceful and queenly woman before the throne? That was the one whom our Surgeon found bent almost double, and could in no wise lift up herself, and he made her straight. Who is that listening with such rapture to the music of heaven, solo melting into chorus, cymbal responding to trumpet, and then himself joining in the anthem? Why, that is the man whom our Surgeon found deaf and dumb on the beach of Galilee, and by two touches opened ear-gate and mouth-gate. Who is that around whom the crowds are gathering with admiring look and thanksgiving, and cries of ’93Oh, what he did for me! Oh, what he did for my family! Oh, what he did for the world!’94 That is the Surgeon of all the centuries, the Oculist, the Aurist, the Emancipator, the Saviour. No pay he took on earth. Come, now, and let all heaven pay him with worship that shall never end, and a love that shall never die. On his head be all the crowns! in his hands be all the sceptres! and at his feet be all the worlds!

Autor: T. De Witt Talmage