Page:American Medical Biographies - Kelly, Burrage.djvu/159

BRADBURY by intuition, and by bold treatment was celebrated far and wide for having saved the life of many a patient whose life hung in the balance.

As his medical practice extended a hundred miles North of Oldtown, many wearisome miles did he feel obliged to travel, well knowing that he could never expect proportionate pay for his time or skill. Despite such generosity, he gradually acquired affluence through the kindness of others who were able to pay well.

His fame rested on two special cases. One an "Extensive Laceration of the Muscles of the Forearm" (Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, vol. xxxvii), showing how a very extensive injury of the elbow-joint may, under proper treatment, escape amputation and be useful for life to the patient. Any surgeon would be proud of such a result as Dr. Bradbury obtained. In fact it was never doubted that he was probably unsurpassed in Maine in contriving splints for fractures and in thus saving limbs which otherwise would be amputated.

October 11, 1851, he performed that most formidable operation in surgery, the amputation at the hip-joint for osteo-sarcoma of the femur; the fourth time it had ever been performed successfully in this country.

Again in February, 1860, he successfully removed from the neck an enormous fibrous tumor involving the entire parotid, the patient being still alive seven years after.

He once attended the maid servant of a well-to-do man who told the doctor that the woman was poor and he could make his bill as light as possible and "take it out of some one who was more able to pay." A year or two later Dr. Bradbury was called to attend this gentleman's wife and on ultimately handing in the bill, personally, the man saw the items of the bill for the maid servant. The man looked at Dr. Bradbury, and Dr. Bradbury looked at him, their eyes twinkled but the bill was paid in full.

The enormous work of his latter life, in taking care of so many patients at Augusta, impaired his health most seriously. He had an attack of paralysis February 14, 1863, gradually recovered, then relapsed; his mind grew cloudy, his body enfeebled, and he gradually fell asleep into another world, October 3, 1865, undeniably to be enrolled among the most worthy medical men that Maine had seen.



Bradford, Joshua Taylor (1818–1871)

Joshua Taylor Bradford, ovariotomist, was born in Bracken County, Kentucky, December 9, 1818, a son of William Bradford of Virginia, who in 1790 emigrated to Bracken County, his mother being Elizabeth Johnson.

Joshua was educated in Augusta College and studied medicine with his brother, Dr. J. J. Bradford, graduating from Transylvania University in 1839.

From the beginning he directed his attention to surgery, and in all probability received much of his inspiration from (q.v.), his surgical teacher in the Transylvania University. Soon after graduation, he successfully performed an ovariotomy. Lunsford Pitts Yandell says: "And it was not long before he became the foremost surgeon of Kentucky, and of all the West, in that affection. Nor is it too much to say that at the time of his death he stood first among surgeons everywhere—in Europe and in our own country—as an ovariotomist. Not that he had done the operation oftener than any other surgeon. Such is not the fact. It has been performed much oftener by Atlee, Wells, Dunlap, and others; but by none with the measure of success that crowned his operations. In the hands of the surgeons just mentioned the recoveries were respectively 71, 73, and 80 per cent. With Bradford the cases in which he operated successfully amounted to 90 per cent."

But it was not alone in this operation that Dr. Bradford proved himself to be a surgeon of the highest order. In whatever cases he was called to operate he exhibited the same coolness and dexterity, the same fruitfulness in resources, and the same thorough knowledge of his art. It is understood that he meditated a work on operative surgery, but he was not permitted to carry out his purpose.

He continued to practice in Augusta, where he was raised, and not being ambitious preferred the charms of his "Piedmont" home to the allurements of professional life, which goes far towards explaining the comparative obscurity into which he lapsed. Strange to say, unlike McDowell, Dudley and others, he was almost lost to the medical literature of Kentucky which is not altogether to the credit of his followers. He twice declined the chair of surgery and but a short time before his death was again urged to accept the same chair in Cincinnati.

He excised the os calcis and cuboid, New York Medical Times, February, 1862. Most of his cases were reported in the Cincinnati Lancet, "Gross' Surgery," New York