It might be deemed that this advanced position of Morgagni was due rather to intuitive abhorrence of the disease than to the conviction of actual observation, and that his conclusions were the result more of prejudice than of real knowledge. Any such opinion, however, is absolutely contradicted by the fact that he knew and understood better than any one of his generation the pathology of consumption. He pointed out at a time when any chronic affection of the lungs was liable to be considered consumption that there are a number of forms of chronic bronchitis that are not due to pthisis pulmonalis, but to other slow-running conditions within the lungs. He anticipated very completely the present position of surgery with regard to the treatment of cancer. He advised the operative removal of these malignant tumors whenever possible. As Benjamin Ward Richardson points out, this advice was given evidently not with the idea that the disease could be always thus completely cured, but because early operation gave speediest relief of annoying {47} symptoms and assured the greatest prolongation of life. Many other methods of removal of cancerous growths were suggested in Morgagni's time, as in our own, and many false promises made and false hopes raised by their advocates. He pointed out that the quickest, the safest, the surest and in the end, for the patient, the easiest method of removal is by the knife in the hands of the bold and skilful surgeon. After a century and a half of vauntedly great advance, especially in surgery, we are practically in the same position as when Morgagni's advice was penned, and his opinion remains practically as valuable to-day as then. In another important point of medicine Morgagni seems to have anticipated the opinion of our own time. It was the custom to practise venesection very freely. On one or two occasions in his own lifetime Morgagni fell ill and venesection was recommended. His biographer says that he constantly refused this method of treatment, adding very naively, "and he who had often cured others by venesection would never allow this remedy to be used upon himself because, as I believe, he had a natural abhorrence to it." It was an index of thoroughgoing independence of thought in those days to stand out, even for personal reasons, against the overwhelming tradition in favor of blood-letting. But Morgagni had well-grounded doubts as to the remedial efficacy of abstraction of blood, and at least avoided it in his own case.