Page:A cyclopedia of American medical biography vol. 1.djvu/137

 ATLEE

Miss S. J. Hutchinson and had two children, a son and a daughter.

Atlee, John Light (1799-1885).

John L. Atlee was born November 2, 1799, and passed practically all of his active life in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where he died October 1, 1S85. Although he had a very large general practice, it was in the fields of surgery and obstetrics that he won his chief celebrity. He was engaged in active practice for a period of sixty-five years, during which time he performed 2125 important surgical opera- tions, including ovariotomy, lithotomy, amputations, operations for strangulated hernia, trephining, ligation of arteries, tracheotomy, and operations on the eye. He also attended 3,264 parturitions.

Dr. Atlee's chief claim to fame, how- ever, is that he was the surgeon who revised the operation of ovariotomy. This operation had been suggested by William Hunter in 1762, and was subse- quently alluded to as feasible by John Hunter and by John Bell.

Ephraim McDowell, of Kentucky, was so impressed with the teaching of the latter that upon his return to the United States in December, 1S09, he successfully removed an ovarian cyst by abdominal section. The operation was, however, regarded with such general disfavor that prior to 1843 but five cases were reported. On the twenty-ninth of June, 1843, Dr. Atlee performed his first operation of ovariotomy, removing both ovaries with complete success. During the period from 1843 to 1883, Dr. Atlee performed the operation of ovariotomy seventy- eight times, with sixty-four recoveries and fourteen deaths.

He was held in the highest esteem both within and without his profession, He was president and one of the founders of both the State Medical Association and the American Medical Association, also professor of anatomy and physiology in Franklin and Marshall College, and president of the Board of Trustees of the State Lunatic Asylum at Harriaburg, Pennsylvania. F. It. P.

i ATLEE

Address delivered before the Lancaster City

Medical Association, November 4, 1SS5, by

J. L. Ziegler.

Med. Rec, N. Y., 1885, vol. xxviii.

Med. and Surg. Reporter, Phila., 1882, vol.

xlvii.

Tr. Am. Surg. Ass., Phila., 1888, vol. vi.

Tr. Coll. Phys. Phila., 1886, 3. s., vol. viii

(D. H. Agnew).

Atlee, Washington Lemuel (1808-1878). The work of a pioneer is primarily that of demolition of existent ignorance, and the dust he raises so chokes and blinds those close behind that they see not his good work until able to step safely where he has led, but they revile him meanwhile for the disturbance of hoary ignorances. This was exactly the fate of Washington L. Atlee, the man who did more than anyone in the world to establish ovari- otomy as a legitimate practice. Born in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, February 22, 180S, he was the youngest son of William Pitt Atlee, and grandson of the Hon. William Augustus Atlee, one of the early judges of the Supreme Court. The surgeon-to-be was at fourteen placed in a drygoods store, but being the boy he was naturally did not stay there but began to study medicine with his brother John at Lancaster. He took his diploma in 1829 from Jefferson Medical College, Philadel- phia, and soon after married Miss Ann Eliza Hoff of Lancaster and settled in the village of Mount Joy, but in 1834 re- turned to Lancaster and practised there for ten years, always investigating and on the alert for fresh knowledge; 1845 saw him professor of medical chemistry in the University of Pennsylvania, but so many were the demands of private patients that he finally devoted himself wholly to these. While still in Lancaster he was known as a skilful and courageous opera- tor and some of hiscases published in the "American Journal of Medical Sciences" caught the attention of his medical con- freres. Before leaving Lancaster he did two ovariotomies, the first on March 29, 1844, and his three hundred and eighty- seventh on May 31, 1878. In 1845, after great research, he collected statistics of 101 ovariotomies, and published them