Page:American Medical Biographies - Kelly, Burrage.djvu/493

GROSS qua non. "This," he says, "was the turning-point of my life. I had made a great discovery—a knowledge of my ignorance, and with it came a solemn determination to remedy it." Accordingly he stopped at once in his medical career and went to an academy at Wilkes-Barre. He studied especially Latin and Greek, the latter by the use of Schrevelius' lexicon, in which all the definitions were in Latin, and Ross's grammar, constructed on the same principle. But to a master will such as his even such obstacles were not insuperable. To Greek and Latin, English and German, later years added also a knowledge of French and Italian.

At nineteen he began the study of medicine again—a study in which for sixty years his labors never for a moment ceased or even relaxed.

In 1828, at the age of twenty-three, he took his degree in the third class which was graduated from the Jefferson Medical College. He opened an office first in Philadelphia, but soon removed to Easton. Nothing is more characteristic of the man than that, while waiting for practice, he spent hours daily in dissecting in a building he erected at the back of his garden, and provided himself with a subject by driving in a buggy all the way from Easton to Philadelphia and back with a gruesome companion; wrote a work on descriptive anatomy, which, however, he never published, and in eighteen months after graduation had translated and published Bayle and Hollard's General Anatomy; Hatin's Obstetrics; Hildebrand on Typhus, and Tavernier's Operative Surgery—works aggregating over eleven hundred pages. His motto was indeed "Nulla dies sine linea." His "stimulus," he himself says, "was his ambition and his poverty."

In 1833, five years after his graduation, he entered upon his career as a teacher—a career which continued for forty-nine years, till within two years of his death. This took him first to Cincinnati as demonstrator of anatomy in the Medical College of Ohio. In 1835 he became professor of pathological anatomy in the Cincinnati Medical College, where he was a colleague of (q. v.),  (q. v.), and  (q. v.), the last being one of the famous four brothers, with a second of whom—Robert E.—he was later a colleague in the Jefferson.

His book on the "Diseases and Injuries of the Bones and Joints" had appeared in 1830, and next, as a result of four years' study and teaching, his "Elements of Pathological Anatomy," two volumes, was published in 1839. It is strange to think that in a then small western town in America a young teacher in a new medical school should have published the first book in the English language on pathological anatomy. No wonder, then, that it brought him fame and practice; that its second edition made him a member of the Imperial Royal Society in Vienna; and that thirty years afterward, Virchow, at a dinner he gave to its then distinguished author, should show it as one of the prizes of his library.

In 1840 he went to the University of Louisville as professor of surgery, and excepting one year when he was professor of surgery in the University of the City of New York, he remained there for sixteen years, happy in his family, his students, his flowers, and his generous hospitality. He and his colleagues— Drake and (q. v.)—soon made it the most important medical centre in the West, and he was in surgery the reigning sovereign. While there he published, in 1851, his work on "Diseases, Injuries and Malformations of the Urinary Organs," and in 1854 another pioneer work, that on "Foreign Bodies in the Air Passages." His fame had become so great that he was invited to the University of Virginia, the University of Louisiana, the University of Pennsylvania, and other schools. But he was steadfast to Louisville until his beloved Alma Mater called him to the chair just vacated by (q. v.). From 1856, when in his Introductory he said, "Whatever of life and of health and of strength remain to me, I hereby, in the presence of Almighty God and of this large assemblage dedicate to the cause of my Alma Mater, to the interest of medical science, and to the good of my fellow-creatures," till he resigned his chair in 1882— nay, till his death in 1884—this was absolutely true. Even when the shadows of death were thickening he corrected the proof-sheets of two papers on "Wounds of the Intestines" and "Lacerations Consequent upon Parturition," his last labors in the service of science and humanity.

Three years after he entered upon his duties at the Jefferson he published his splendid "System of Surgery"—a work which, though in many respects now obsolete as to its pathology and its practice, is a mine of information, a monument of untiring labor, a textbook worthy of its author. It has been the companion and guide of many generations of students. It was translated into several foreign tongues and passed through six editions, the last appearing only seventeen months before his death. That even when verging