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MINER

chusetts, and to Albany Medical College, New York, taking his degree from the latter in 1847. While in New York he also took up special surgical and ophthal- mological studies. First he practised in New Braintree, Massachusetts, after- wards in Buffalo, being appointed in ISGO visiting surgeon to the Buffalo General Hospital; in 1867, professor of surgical anatomy and ophthalmology; in 1870, professor of special and clinical surgery. His last course of lectures was delivered in 1881-82. When in 1861 he issued the first number of the " Buffalo Medical and Surgical Journal " his idea was to afford a means of communication between the practitioners of the vicinity and his editorship soon made the journal one worth reading.

He was best known as a surgeon. He performed most of the important opera- tions of his day and in more than one instance instituted procedures which have been widely adopted. Four times he successfully performed thyroidectomy, and ligated the external iliac artery for aneurysm; the internal and external car- otid and most of the other arteries that require ligation for injury or disease: he removed a spleen weighing over seven pounds, with fatal result; exsected for traumatism and disease of the hip, knee, ankle, shoulder- and wrist-joints; in two cases he removed over four and a half inches of the femur, securing a useful limb. A similar operation was done on the humerus, removing large portions of the shaft for gunshot or other injuries; he removed the entire fibula successfully and the ulna with the elbow-joint, so saving an aim; twice he removed foreign bodies from the opening of the left bronchus; in operating for recto- vaginal fistula he instituted a procedure as suc- cessful as it was novel and ingenious. Many of these operations call for boldness and originality even at our stage of devel- opment in surgery; nearly all were specially noteworthy at that time and form a Ust of major operations equalled by few contemporary surgeons. His operation for ovarian tumor in 1869 will

be regarded as his greatest addition to surgery. (" Buffalo Medical and Surgi- cal Journal," June, 1869.) He had pre- viously (1866), for the first time in the history of ovariotomy, tied separately the vessels of the pedicle, cut the liga- tures short and returned the pedicle to the abdominal cavity with success. In an emergency he ligated the radial artery with a pocket knife and an aneurysm needle fashioned from a hairpin. As one said, speaking as a layman: " With nerves of tempered steel, he had a gentle hand, a tender heart, a compassionate nature." In 1867, while operating upon a charity patient, he pricked his thumb with a spicula of bone and received the infec- tion which eventually ended his fife. Iritis and other symptoms followed, but it was not until 1873 that serious results were observed. His lectures in 1881-82 were dehvered sitting and at their close he resigned and became emeritus professor. His paper on " Ovari- otomy by Enucleation without Clamp, Ligature or Cautery" appeared in the "American Journal of Medical Science," vol. Ixiv, 1872. Late in the summer of 1886 I saw him for the last time. Our talk ran on the production of his old friend, the late Austin Fhnt, and we talked of the ideas he had so well set forth in that address. The end came early on the fifth of November, 1886. He sought in religion as he had sought in medicine, to know the truth, and had found it and faced death with the same cheerfulness with which he had met the weariness of protracted illness.

E. N. B.

Abridged from An Address on the Life and

Character of Julius F. Miner, by Dr. E. N.

Brush, Phila., 1888.

Buffalo Med. and Surg. Jour., 18S6-7. vol.

xxvi.

N. York Med. Jour., 1886, vol. xliv.

Med. Press, West. N. York, Buffalo, 1885-6,

vol. i.

Miner, Thomas (1777-1841).

An early investigator of epidemic cere- brospinal meningitis, one of the most learned physicians of this day, Thomas Miner was born in Westfield, the north-