The Want of Surgical Mechanicians in India

much felt in Calcutta, and I therefore trust that the distinguished professors of our Metropolitan College will pardon me for venturing publicly to write on a subject with which some experience, as a surgeon in the mofussil, has made mo paiul'ully familiar. If we take the annual returns of the operations performed at the different dispensaries in the North-Western Provinces, for example, we shall find that a large number of amputations of limbs arc annually performed, and a large number of lives thereby yearly saved. But ought we, as 6urgeons, to rest satisfied with the salvation of life at tho cost of a limb ? Is it not extremely painful to us to see the poor wretches whose legs or thighs we have mutilated, either condemned to crawl along the ground, or to hop on one leg, or to hobblo along by the aid of a stick, which has a cross bar placed at a right angle for the bent knee to rest on and which rudo and cumbrous representative of an artificial limb needs the assistance of both the arms of the patient for him to use it at all ? Surgeons, hore and there, I know, havo constructed artificial limbs for their patieuts, but I speak only within my own knowledge, when I say that, though I have seen