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edutacional advantages as his winter at- tendance at the district school afforded. However, after a somewhat rudimentary education, at the age of twenty-one he en- tered the Susquehanna Collegiate Insti- tute at Towanda to prepare for college. One year was spent at Marietta College in Ohio, and he graduated from Hamilton College at Clinton, New York, in 1863. Then followed one year in the Medical School of Michigan University. He en- tered the Bellevue Hospital Medical Col- lege in New York in 1865 and graduated in 1867, his professional life beginning in LeRaysville, Pennsylvania, and continu- ing 1871, at Wilkes- Barre, Pennsylvania, in which place he practised till his death in August, 1895.

A physician and surgeon of great abil- ity, he was the first man in his section of the state to perform ovariotomy and did this many times successfully at a time when operation was rare. He was a member of the surgical staff of Wilkes- Barre City Hospital from its beginning till his death.

According to Prof. William Goodell, who quotes him at great length, Dr. Davis performed the second vaginal ova- riotomy on record. This case was re- ported originally in "Transactions of the Medical Society of Pennsylvania," 1874, vol. x, p. 221. Dr. Ashhurst in his "Sur- gery" quotes Dr. Davis as an ovariot- omist and cites the above case. Dr. Davis' paper "On a New Method of treat- ing Placenta Previa," read before the Pennsylvania State Medical Society in 1876, attracted much attention and on its merits he was elected an honorary member of the Philadelphia Obstetrical Society. He was on the surgical staff of Wilkes- Barre City Hospital until his death, and president of the State Medical Society in 1886.

Dr. Davis was an extensive contributor of papers to medical literature, writing among others " Vaginal Ovariotomy," 1874; "Placenta Previa," 1876; "Pelvic Peritonitis, Cellulitis and Hematocele," 1875; "Hernia of Liver in Infant," 1876; "Diphtheria," 1878; " Removal of Vesical

I DAVIS

Calculus," 1880; "Potability of the Water of Large Cities," 18S5; "Rabies," 1886; "Median Operation for Stone," 1888; "The Filtration of City Water," 1894. L. II. T.

Davis, William Elias Brownlee (1863- 1902).

As a gynecologist and an originator of the Southern Surgical and Gynecolog- ical Association, of which he was president in 1901, William Elias Brownlee Davis is remembered in his native state of Ala- bama, where he was born on November 25, 1863, in Trussville, Jefferson County, the sixth in a line of doctors, his father, a Confederate Army surgeon, being killed in the war. The boy's life was that of many another genius: farm work and study, delicate health and scanty means, yet he won through it all, graduated at the University of Alabama, began practice with his doctor brother and took his M. D. at Bellevue Hospital College in 1884.

From the first he devoted himself specially to gynecology and abdominal surgery, and his sudden death left un- finished a work on "Hepatic Surgery." In 1892 he experimented on 200 dogs for the purpose of determining the treat- ment of common bile duct obstruction, establishing the principle that sterile bile is inoffensive to the peritoneum, that transperitoneal gauze draining of the common duct is a safe procedure; after removal of calculi from the common duct suture of the duct is unnecessary. By diligent observation and experi- mentation, far from laboratories, he pursued his way of original investigation. He fully appreciated the need of a medical association, and with his brother organized the Alabama Surgical and Gynecological Society. In 1900 he himself was presi- dent of the American Association of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and also honorary fellow of the state societies of New York, Louisiana and the British Gynecological Society.

The end came very suddenly, as the result of a railway accident, on February 24, 1902, and a monument was erected