Page:American Medical Biographies - Kelly, Burrage.djvu/494

GROSS toward fourscore he should have been willing to throw aside all his strong prejudices and accept the then struggling principles and practice of Listerism shows the progressive character of his mind and his remarkable willingness to welcome new truths.

From his removal to Philadelphia till his death, twenty-eight years later, his life can be summed up in a few sentences: daily labor in his profession, editorial labor without cessation; for some years in managing the North American Medico-Chirurgical Review, the successor of the Louisville Medical Review, of which he had also been the editor; article after article in journals; address after address; twenty-six annual courses of lectures on surgery to thousands of students; labors without ceasing till he wrapped the drapery of his couch around him and calmly passed away.

He married a lady of English descent of many accomplishments, who proved indeed a helpmate—one who, with hopeful courage, lightened the burden of care during the struggles of his early life, and enriched the glories of his triumphs in the meridian of his manhood. The best of fathers, he had in his later years of retirement the constant companionship and care of the most devoted of children. His son, (q. v.), followed in the professional footsteps of his father.

As a surgeon Gross was painstaking, thorough and careful in his investigation of a case, skilful as an operator, and, having so vast an experience and equally extensive acquaintance with the wide literature of his profession, he was scarcely ever perplexed by the most difficult case and rarely at a loss as to the proper course to pursue in the most unexpected emergencies.

His influence on the profession was marked and wholesome. For many years he was almost always at the annual meetings of the American Medical Association and the American Surgical Association, was looked up to in both as the Nestor of the profession, and his papers and his wise words of counsel molded both the thought and the action of his brethren to a notable degree. He founded two medical journals, was the founder of the Pathological Society of Philadelphia and of the Philadelphia Academy of Surgery, the founder and first president of the American Surgical Association, and the first president of the Alumni Association of the Jefferson Medical College. It was peculiarly fitting, therefore, that these last two associations should unite in erecting and unveiling a bronze statue of one who did so much for them and whom they rightly delighted to honor. All who knew his tall, manly figure and his fine face will agree that the likeness is remarkable, both in pose and feature. Could I only get a glimpse of the right hand which holds his familiar scalpel I would recognize the man. ''Ex pede Herculem! Ex manu Gross!''

As an author, his chief characteristics were untiring industry, comprehensiveness, methodical treatment of his subject, and a singular felicity of style, especially for one who acquired English so late and with difficulty. In fact, through life his speech, by a slight, though not unpleasant accent, always betrayed his German descent.

He blazed more than one new trail in the forests of surgical ignorance. In the early part, and even in the middle of the nineteenth century, it was rare for Americans to write medical books. The most they did was either to translate a French or a German work or to annotate an English one. He was one of the earliest to create an American medical literature of importance, and his works on the urinary organs, on foreign bodies in the air passages, and his text-book on surgery gave a position to American surgery abroad which we can now hardly appreciate; while, as already related, his pathological anatomy was the very first work in the English language on that most important branch. In 1861 he edited "American Medical Biography," and in 1887 his autobiography, with sketches of his contemporaries, was published.

His experiments and monograph on "Wounds of the Intestines" (1843) laid the foundation for the later studies of Parkes, Senn, and other American surgeons, and have led to the modern rational and successful treatment of these then so uniformly fatal injuries. He first advocated abdominal section in rupture of the bladder, the use of adhesive plaster in fractures of the legs, amputation in senile gangrene, and the immediate uniting of tendon to tendon when they were divided in an incised wound. Had he lived but a year or two longer, bacteriology would have shown him that scrofula was of tuberculous origin, and not, as he so firmly believed and vigorously taught, a manifestation of hereditary syphilis.

That his eminence as an author should have met with recognition from scientific organizations and institutions of learning is no cause of surprise. It made him the president of the International Medical Congress of 1876, a member of many of the scientific societies of