A Treatise on Stricture of the Urethra

A Treatise on Stricture of the Urethra is a nineteenth-century surgical text by George Macilwain (1797-1882), the Irish-born English surgeon and writer on medical reform. Macilwain spent his career at the Finsbury Dispensary and St. Bartholomew’s in London, and produced clinical works on surgery alongside polemical writing in favour of vegetable diet and against bloodletting. This treatise gathers his observations on the diagnosis, classification, and treatment of urethral stricture, drawing on cases he treated over decades and on the changing surgical practice of the early Victorian period. The book is now of interest mainly as a record of how pre-anaesthetic and early-anaesthetic surgery approached a common but difficult condition, and as an example of the systematic clinical writing of the London teaching hospitals in the middle of the nineteenth century. Free PDF download available on BDeBooks.