Page:A History of the Medical Department of the University of Pennsylvania.djvu/180

 his lectures. In the lecture-room he confined himself chiefly to the demonstrations of the text of his work, by dissections, preparations, drawings, and models.” Dr. Jackson further remarks, with respect to this plan: “On the value of the method there will be different opinions, but it is certain that he made good anatomists. I have frequently heard students declare, that plain, simple, and unadorned as were the lectures of Dr. Horner, that they had learned anatomy better from him than from any others they had heard lecture on that branch.”

“The Anatomical Museum of the University, founded, as has been narrated, by Dr. Wistar, is an evidence of the great anatomical skill and untiring application of Dr. Horner. A very large portion of it, upwards of two-thirds at the time of his death, and containing most of its finest preparations, rivalling those of the best anatomical museums of Europe, was the result of his labors. Dr. Horner, from time to time, presented the preparations he had made to the University, which was acknowledged by the Board of Trustees, but on his death he bequeathed an extensive collection, together will all his instruments and apparatus connected with dissections, to the Medical Department.” The Trustees have, in consequence of this liberal bequest, bestowed on the collection thus constituted, the name of the “Wistar and Horner Museum.”

Dr. Horner is entitled to credit as an original observer. He determined the existence of a special muscle, situated on the posterior surface of the lachrymal duct and sac, which solved the difficulty of explanation as to the mode by which the tears were conveyed into the nose. He named the muscle tensor tarsi. Its existence has been verified by anatomists in this country and in Europe, where it has been called “Musculus Horneri.”

He also first detected the fact that in cholera the whole of the epithelium was stripped from the small intestines, and hence the turbid rice-water dejections in that disease. This he did by making a minute injection of the mucous membrane, and then examining it by the microscope under water. The paper announcing this discovery was published in the