Page:American Medical Biographies - Kelly, Burrage.djvu/236

CHEEVER in clean-cut simple words, in an easy conversational manner lacking any spectacular elements. His clinical teaching was seasoned with shrewd intuition and a dry wit which never stung. His sympathy with the patient and interest in the student created a helpful atmosphere of mutual understanding. He insisted that the opportunities of a hospital surgeon imposed the obligations, first, to succor the patient, and, second, to share his advantages with students and fellow physicians. He was a leader in medical progress and played a foremost part in the reforms of medical edu cation at Harvard under the administration of President Charles W. Eliot.

As a clinical teacher of surgery he instituted the class conference, a weekly clinical essay by a student with criticisms and comments by his fellows and instructors. At the hospital, he established a "Concours," or competitive examination for house-officers, until then unknown in New England. He supported the high and increasing premedical requirements for admission to the Medical School, the graded four-year course, and the development of laboratory and clinical teaching.

His was a slim, slightly stooping figure: his frame was frail, but in action vigorous. His manner was reserved, preoccupied, absorbed, partly by nature and partly by a curious inaptness in recognizing faces. His mien, his words, his clothes were without pretense—the outward expression of native simplicity and dignity. Weighing about one hundred and thirty pounds, his delicate physique seemed scarcely able to bear the weight of work, responsibility, and anxiety which he carried. He loved three things completely and unreservedly—his home, his profession and Nature. For years each major case operated on (usually for charity) at the hospital was visited again in the evening. An impecunious early case of esophagotomy, slow to recover, was visited at his home daily for a year. Many years later this patient tendered him a fee of one hundred dollars. A case of ovariotomy, before the days of antisepsis, was visited every six hours—at six o'clock in the morning, at noon, in the evening and at midnight, until her recovery.

Cheever was active in medical societies; he organized a conference of the hospital staff. He initiated and aided wise public health legislation. For years he was one of the bulwarks at legislative hearings against the measures of the anti-vivisectionists and antivaccinationists. He helped to overthrow the pernicious coroner system in 1877, substituting the trained medical examiner. He fought for the sanctity of privileged communications from patient to physician, under due legal safeguards. He was often sought as an expert, since judge and jury recognized his sincerity and freedom from prejudice; he gave this up because, to quote his own words: "I can almost say that I never left the court after testifying with a feeling of honorable satisfaction, or that I had been allowed to tell the exact truth after complicated questions and having my mouth shut by technicalities."

He was president of the American Surgical Association (1889); president of the Massachusetts Medical Society (1888–1890), and of many local professional organizations. He was honorary member of various state and foreign societies. He was president of the Boston Medical Library from 1896 to 1906, during the time that the funds were raised and the Library was established in its new building at the Fenway. Urged in his old age to become charter member of the American College of Surgeons, he hesitated, but in 1915 at the meeting in Boston, he accepted honorary membership.

He married Anna C. Nichols of Boston in 1860, and the advent of six children constituted their chief happiness. His greatest sorrows were the deaths' in childhood of his first-born, a son, and in adult life of a daughter by accidental drowning. He made to the Medical School and Hospital generous gifts, and gave in private to the needy; it was his especial delight to aid poor students and worthy colleagues. At leisure during the last ten years of his life, he resumed the study of Latin and Greek with a Harvard teacher, who, when cataract dimmed the vision, became his faithful secretary. Though doubtless aware that he could not live to greet his return, he gladly urged his only son to accept an opportunity to bring surgical aid to the wounded in France. On December 27, 1915, shortly after his eighty-fourth birthday, he died after a short illness and in full possession of his faculties.

 Cheever, Henry Sylvester (1837–1877)

Henry S. Cheever was born on August 8, 1837, at Exeter, Otsego County, New York, but in 1844 his family moved to Geneva, Illinois; in 1856 to Tecumseh, Michigan, and in 1859 to Ann Arbor. The lad prepared for college at Tecumseh and graduated A. B. from Michigan University in 1863 and M. D. in 1866, beginning practice in Ann Arbor, and quickly gaining a large clientele. In 1867 he was appointed demonstrator of anatomy at the