With the information below as a prelude to a definitive answer from
someone more expert in this area, I'd say the answer would be a
tentative "yes," depending on what you mean by "capable of dealing
with." While basic diagnosis and surgical skills apparently have a
foothold by 1900, it would seem that the success rate was not high and
surgical interventions the exception rather than the rule.
The website of the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland locates the
early development of neurosurgery as a specialty in the last couple
decades of the 19th century and includes the U.S. in the summary of
key countries and physicians: ?Its pioneers in the United Kingdom in
the 1880s were Sir William Macewen (1848-1924), Sir Rickman Godlee
(1849-1925), and Sir Victor Horsley (1857-1916). Others, e.g.
Francesco Durante (1844-1934) and Fedor Krause (1856-39), worked
effectively in Europe. Harvey Cushing (1869-1939), Halstead's
assistant at the Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore, introduced new
standards and attracted many trainees to his own department in
Boston's Peter Bent Brigham Hospital.?
http://www.rcsi.ie/library/History_of_Medicine/Specialization/index.asp?id=1096&pid=1096&jid=33&jpid=1086
According to ?History of acoustic neurinoma surgery,? an article in
Neurosurgical Focus (2005) that relates a general chronology of the
early treatments for a specific type of benign intracranial tumor,
presumptive diagnoses of such tumors were being made in the 1890s.
These early diagnoses were based on an increasing ability to make "a
more solid correlation of a patient?s clinical symptoms with the
actual diagnosis obtained at autopsy.? There seems to be general
agreement, according to the article, that surgical interventions were
used on intracranial tumors perhaps as early as 1890 (the patient died
before the tumor could be localized). But, in general, surgical
treatments were ?still held in disregard during that early period.? It
was apparently not until Cushing?s era that surgical techniques became
standardized and began to have a higher rate of success.
http://www.aans.org/education/journal/neurosurgical/apr05/18-4-9.pdf |
