The CAVENDISH LECTURE on SOME PHASES of INFLAMMATION of the APPENDIX

THE APPEARING OF APPENDICITIS. MR. PRESIDENT AND GENTLEMEN,-Among those circumstances which are remarkable in the history of medicine in the closing years of the nineteenth century, few are more curious than the almost abrupt appearance of the disease now known as appendicitis. Less than twenty years ago this malady was practically unrecognized, it found no accepted place in the systematic manuals of medicine, and its very name had not been called into being. The title " appendicitis " was proposed by Fitz' in a communication published in i886, and although the term is uncouth and lacking in preciseness, it at once found a place in the clumsy nomenclature of medicine. In spite of many protests from the academically minded, the word has passed into general use, and has received, moreover, the liberal patronage of the lay public. There is a bold aggressive modernness about the name suited to a modern disease, which has become with singular alacrity " understanded of the people," and which has advanced, as regards its affairs, in a distinctly modern manner. It is needless to say that this clumsily named malady is not a new disease which has just fallen, as a last plague, upon mankind, nor is there evidence to support the suggestion that it has undergone any recent and remarkable recrudescence, or that it has become more frequent in its appearance. It is a modern malady only in the sense that it has been unearthed and brought into the light in recent years. It can be traced back to distant eenturies, and there is no reason why the cave man should not have occasionally succumbed to its ill-effects. The disease has been buried until now under a vast heap of confused and confusing clinical fragments, and under much vague verbiage. It passed unrecognized in earlier times under the disguise of such terms as "gastric attack" or "gastric seizure," "paratyphlitis," "cramp of the bowels,"