systematically by Stromeyer and popularized in France by Guerin. Operations on nerves were studied as special methods by Schuh, Wernher, and Nussbaum. Jobert and Simon abroad, and Sims and Emmet in the United States, by their studies of fistulæ peculiar to the genito-urinary tract in females, have conferred inestimable benefits upon suffering womanhood. So late as 1839 Vidal declared there did not exist in the history of surgery a single well-authenticated case of complete cure of vesicovaginal tear. It is not my intention to more than barely refer to the living surgeons of to-day, or those who have but very recently passed away from us; but it would be an injustice to overlook Bernhard von Langenbeck and Theodor Billroth. The former, born in 1810 and deceased in 1887, was for a time a teacher of physiology, but subsequently became successor of Dieffenbach in the University of Berlin. The influence he exerted upon surgery in Germany and (since the decline of French precedence) upon surgery all over the world, has perhaps been greater than that of any one man since Dupuytren's time. He it was that introduced into surgical technique and surgical pathology the experimental method of which Johannes Müller was the great{265} exponent; indeed, the relatively high importance which pathology is given to-day in every surgical curriculum is due more to his labors than to those of any other one man. Genial, learned, indefatigable, he was the ideal accomplished teacher. It would be impossible in any short _résumé_ of his life and labors to do justice to so distinguished a man, to whom the profession owes so much. Perhaps the highest testimonial that could be given would be the enumeration of the men who were ever and always his enthusiastic admirers. Langenbeck was the founder of the German Congress of Surgeons, and for many years its president, and the permanent home this association has built for itself in Berlin bears his name; the surgical journal he founded has now passed its fiftieth volume, and is today the first periodical of its class in any country or language. [Illustration: 0285] [Illustration: 0286]