Page:American Medical Biographies - Kelly, Burrage.djvu/234

CHEEVER He published in 1787 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 Arts and Sciences.

He was a genial and much liked physician and surgeon.

  Cheever, Charles Augustus (1793–1852)

This son of (q. v.) 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 dispensary practice, then the only clinical opportunity in Boston.

In 1816 he received his M. D. and settled in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where he was the leading surgeon for thirty-six years, until his untimely death in 1852. Previous to this he made a voyage to the West Indies to carry vaccination, 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 compact town of about seven to nine thousand people. It was intensely conservative, older physicians were abundant, and his progress in acquiring practice was extremely slow.

Although always somewhat impecunious, he lavished his scanty means in all expenses which would advance him as a doctor. He bought new books, was extravagant in new instruments, and disregarded cost of 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 material could be obtained only by very expensive purchase. $25 to $50, from New York and Philadelphia (no railway transportation), or by illegal means. The cadavers were obtained and dissected 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 operations. Considering the limitations, ignorance, 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 operated 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 problems; enlightened only by his own dissections 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 domestic griefs which preyed on a sensitive nature.



Cheever, David Williams (1831–1915)

David W. Cheever, Boston surgeon, was born in Portsmouth, N. H., November 30, 1831, the son of (q. v.), a widely known physician in Portsmouth and Southern New Hampshire, and his wife, of the well-known Haven family of that city.

Cheever, educated chiefly at home, entered Harvard in 1848. where, as he wrote. "I studied Italian with Longfellow, who extemporized Dante into English verse; German with Bernard Rolker; Botany with Gray; modern literature with James Russell Lowell; natural history with Agassiz; and metaphysics with James Walker, who had a great influence on my life." After graduation, he went to Europe, and returning in several months, he began the study of medicine (1854) at the age of twenty-three, entering the Harvard Medical School, where Oliver Wendell Holmes taught anatomy, Storer obstetrics, and Henry J. Bigelow surgery.

In summer he went to the rival Boylston Medical School, taught by an ambitious group of young men without hospital or Harvard connections, where individual teaching and enthusiasm rewarded his venture. He accepted the position of student assistant at the State Penal Hospital on Rainsford Island in Boston harbor, where a profitable clinical experience in every department of medicine and,