Page:A cyclopedia of American medical biography vol. 2.djvu/97

 LANE

his own hands he invented a working steam engine, a double stitch sewing ma- chine (long before such things were ever patented), and a mowing machine with which he lost a fortune by neglecting to get a patent.

He improved the telephone, and was an expert electrician. For several years he kept the town clock wound up, and in constant repair, climbing the tall tower for that purpose.

He was the leader of the village band, and a teacher of each instrument. He was the originator and took care of all the water works. Besides all this, he in- vented several surgical instruments, and among them an automatic vaccinator, which is still in use in times of threatened epidemics. He was an ingenious man, and when he died from an apoplectic stroke, February 14, 1894, it seemed as if the whole village ceased to live or breathe. J. A. S.

Trans. Maine Med. Assoc, 1894.

Lane, Levi Cooper (1833-1902).

Of English Quaker stock, Levi Cooper Lane was born in Ohio May 9, 1830. His early education was partly private, partly in Farmer's College and Union College, Schnectady, from which latter he received his M. A., and in 1877 his LL. D.

He graduated in 1851 from Jefferson Medical College and in the same year was appointed interne in New York State Hospital on Ward's Island where he re- mained four years.

In 1855 he entered the navy, but four years later resigned and settled to prac- tise in San Francisco with his uncle, Dr. Elias Samuel Cooper, for whom Cooper Medical College was later named. He at once became identified, as professor of physiology, with the medical department of the University of the Pacific — the first medical school on the Pacific coast and of which Dr. Cooper was the leading spirit. In the following year Cooper died, and this school was discontinued and Dr. Lane called as professor of anatomy to the newly organized Toland Medical Col- VoL. II-6

81 LANE

lege; but in 1870, in association with its old members and some new blood he re- vived the original school which he entered as professor of surgery. In 1882 he built a fine college building, which he incorpor- ated as Cooper Medical College. To this he added, in 1890, Lane Hall, and in 1894 Lane Hospital, the total gift approx- imating half a million dollars — money earned by himself in his profession, as he expressed it.

Dr. Lane was a most indefatigable student. His impromptu thesis before the Navy Board was in Latin. German and French were to him familiar tongues and he knew also Greek, Spanish and Italian. For many years it was his custom to de- vote the early morning hours to reading, investigation and writing. Thus he wrote his scholarly work, the "Surgery of the Head and Neck."

As a surgeon Dr. Lane, following Sir Astley Cooper, never operated on an im- portant case without previously perform- ing the operation on the cadaver. In his knowledge of anatomy and surgery he had not his superior on the coast — prob- ably not his equal.

Not only was he skillful and resource- ful but he possessed decided originahty. He devised a number of new operations, notably vaginal hysterectomy, which he was the first to perform in America and which he devised as an original proce- dure, not being aware that the operation had been performed a number of times in France in the early years of the century. He also originated an operation for cran- iectomy, for microcephalia and devised important changes in hare-lip operations.

Notwithstanding Dr. Lane's active and energetic life, his physical side was far from robust. In early youth he had been asthmatic, and a resultant emphy- sema had rendered him liable to frequent attacks of bronchitis. He spent some months of the winter of 1882 in Guate- mala, in recuperation, and in the middle seventies gave two years of his life to study in Europe where he received the M. R. C. S. (Eng.) degree and the M. D. of Berlin.