Page:A cyclopedia of American medical biography vol. 1.djvu/287

 CHEEVER

CHEEVER

He published in 17S7 a remarkable case of "Encysted Dropsy" (which now would be termed a Dermoid Cyst of the Ovary) with illustrations. This was demonstrated to the American Academy of Art- and Sciences.

He was a genial and much liked physi- cian and surgeon. D. W. C.

Cheever, Charles Augustus (1 793-1 S52).

This son of Dr. Abijah Cheever was born in Boston December 1, 1793, and entered Harvard in 1809 and took his A. M. in 1813. He had the good fortune to study medicine with Dr. John Warren and in 1815 with Dr. John B. Brown, and enjoyed the benefit of his large dis- pensary practice, then the only clinical opportunity in Boston.

In 1816 he received his M. D. and set- tled in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where he was the leading surgeon for thirty-six years, until his untimely death in 1S52. Previous to this he made a voy- age to the West Indies to carry vacci- nation, then a new practice there. His material of vaccine was embodied in an Irish lad whom he vaccinated on starting and took with him to supply the vaccine virus. This trip was entirely successful. Portsmouth, New Hampshire, was a small old compact town of about seven to nine thousand people. It was intensely con- servative, older physicians were abun- dant, and his progress in acquiring prac- tice was extremely slow.

Although always somewhat impecuni- ous, he lavished his scanty means in all expenses which would advance him as a doctor. He bought new books, was ex- travagant in new instruments, and disre- garded cost for knowledge. He early attracted students, and always had from one to three under him.

He formed a good library, read and catechized his students, took them to see his cases, taught them to dissect and to prepare anatomical injections, dried specimens and skeletons, so that he collected for those times an unusual though small museum. Anatomical ma- terial could be obtained only by very

expensive purchase, S25 to 850, from New York and Philadelphia (no railway transportation), or by illegal means.

The cadavers were obtained and dis- sected in the attic of his house. His home was the center of anatomical and surgical knowledge for thirty miles around, and over this area he was for thirty-six years known as The Surgeon. His work ranged from dentistry and obstetrics to the major surgical opera- tions. Considering the limitations, ignor- ance, prejudice and timidity with which he was surrounded, it is remarkable that he undertook, for his first attempts, new and recently described operations.

He operated successfully for cataract, and to ensure it kept his patient in his own house and nursed him. He oper- ated for strabismus, also removed breasts and tumors, amputated limbs. The first asepsis of subcutaneous surgery coming to his early knowledge, he operated for club-foot and tendon sections, and treated his patients by apparatus. He was among the first here to follow up a trephining by laying open the dura mater for hemorrhage or for abscess. No asepsis, no ether! nerve and audacity were required to assail these new prob- lems; enlightened only by his own dissec- tions and his own reading, he practised what he had never seen. The unaided natural senses of sight and touch guided a hand, erudite only by dissection, safely to the recesses of a quivering and moving patient.

Keen insight, intuition even, made him a noted diagnostician, esteemed as such by his contemporaries.

He died too early, shattered by domes- tic griefs which preyed on a sensitive nature. D. W. C.

Cheever, Henry S. (1837-1877).

Henry S. Cheever was born on August 8, 1837, at Exeter, Otsego County, New York, but in 1844 his family moved to Geneva, Illinois; in 1856 to Tecumseh, Michigan and in 1859 to Ann Arbor. The lad prepared for college at Tecumseh and graduated A. B. from Michigan