But it is obvious that none of these expedients can be employed, and that these bleedings can neither be checked at the moment, nor permanently stopped, without such a knowledge of the course of the trunks and branches of vessels, as can be acquired only by the study of anatomy. The success of amputation is closely connected with the knowledge of the means of stopping hemorrhage. Not to amputate, is often to abandon the patient to a certain and miserable death. And all that the surgeon formerly did, was to watch the progress of that death: he had no power to stop or even to retard it. The fate of sir Philip Sidney is a melancholy illustration of this truth. This noble-minded man, the light and glory of his age, was cut off in the bloom of manhood, and the midst of his usefulness, by the wound of a musket bullet in his left leg, a little above the knee, “when extraction of the ball, or amputation of the limb,” says his biographer, “would have saved his inestimable life: but the surgeons and physicians were unwilling to practice the one, and knew not how to perform the other. He was variously tormented by a number of surgeons and physicians for three weeks.” Amputation indeed was never attempted except where mortification had itself half performed the operation. The just apprehension of an hemorrhage which there was no adequate means of stopping, checked the hand of the boldest surgeon, and quailed the courage of the most daring patient--and if ever the operation was resorted to, it almost always proved fatal: the patient generally expired, according to the expression of Celsus, “_in ipso opere_.” How could it be otherwise? The surgeon cut through the flesh of his patient with a red hot knife: this was his only means of stopping the hemorrhage: by this expedient he sought to convert the whole surface of the stump into an eschar: but this operation, painful in its execution, and terrible in its consequences, when it even appeared to succeed, succeeded only for a few days; for the bleeding generally returned and proved fatal as soon as the sloughs or dead parts became loose. Plunging the stump into boiling oil, into boiling turpentine, into boiling pitch, for all these means were used, was attended with no happier result, and after unspeakable suffering, almost every patient perished. In the manner in which amputation is performed at present, not more than one person in twenty loses his life in consequence of the operation, even taking into the account all the cases in which it is practised in hospitals. In private practice, where many circumstances favour its success, it is computed that 95 persons out of 100 recover from it, when it is performed at a proper time, and in a proper manner. It seems impossible to exhibit a more striking illustration of the great value of anatomical knowledge.