This operation has given some brilliant results, but it has also hurried a great many to an untimely grave. Fool-hardy surgeons or operators are the rule; doctors of only mediocre talent worm themselves into positions that give them prestige in the community. Where nature refuses a capacity for the acquirement of solid wisdom, she seems to compensate her creatures by endowing them with faculties for cunning and intrigue, that galvanize the spurious into the apparently genuine. They have charge of hospitals and are professors in colleges, and are ambitious to imitate the operations of the European masters. On the other hand are the statistics of able surgeons, who seem to have an inborn genius for a special line of operations; such a one is Lawson Tait, of Birmingham, and Martin, of Berlin. Tait has had phenomenal success in cutting open the abdomen and removing diseased tubes and ovaries. He possesses the faculty and skill to select only those cases that are especially suited for an operation, and those that are not adapted for the knife are excluded. In the exercise of this judgment the danger of the operation is reduced to a, minimum. The tubes and ovaries are often so matted and tied down with inflammatory adhesions, that their removal means sure death, and does the average surgeon know this? To have the genius of a Tait is to be one in ten thousand, and for this reason his statistics should be neither a guide nor an excuse for the other nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine, to attempt to do as he does. To assume that they can, is as absurd as to admit that our indigenous colonels of the State militia can plan or execute the campaigns of Napoleon. Galvanism or electricity has come to the rescue of this class of cases, as a safe and reliable method of treatment; of course it takes more time and patience. Should not this outweigh the selfish ambition of the unscrupulous surgeon who desires to boast of the number of times he has opened the abdomen, with little compunction of the confiding lives that he has sacrificed? I have myself had abundant experience to be convinced of the usefulness of electricity as a curative agent in this class of diseases, but I prefer to illustrate the treatment by quoting from a paper on “The Value of Electricity as a Substitute for Laparotomy,” by Augustin H. Goelet, M. D., in the New York _Medical Journal_. He says:—