Page:American Medical Biographies - Kelly, Burrage.djvu/68

ATLEE 2,125 important surgical operations, including ovariotomy, lithotomy, amputations, operations for strangulated hernia, trephining, ligation of arteries, tracheotomy, and operations on the eye. He also attended 3,264 parturitions.

Dr. Atlee's chief claim to fame, however, is that he was the surgeon who revised the operation of ovariotomy. This operation had been suggested by William Hunter in 1762, and was subsequently alluded to as feasible by John Hunter and by John Bell.

(q.v.), of Kentucky, was so impressed with the teaching of the latter that upon his return to the United States in December, 1809, he successfully removed an ovarian cyst by abdominal section. The operation was, however, regarded with such general disfavor that prior to 1843 but five cases were reported. On the twenty-ninth of June, 1843, Dr. Atlee performed his first operation of ovariotomy, removing both ovaries with complete success. During the period from 1843 to 1883, Dr. Atlee performed the operation of ovariotomy seventy-eight times, with sixty-four recoveries and fourteen deaths.

He was held in the highest esteem both within and without his profession. He was president and one of the founders of both the State Medical Association and the American Medical Association, also professor of anatomy and physiology in Franklin and Marshall College, and president of the board of trustees of the State Lunatic Asylum at Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.



Atlee, Washington Lemuel (1808–1878)

The work of a pioneer is primarily that of demolition of existent ignorance, and the dust he raises so chokes and blinds those close behind that they see not his good work until able to step safely where he has led, but they revile him meanwhile for the disturbance of hoary ignorance. This was exactly the fate of Washington L. Atlee, the man who did more than anyone in the world to establish ovariotomy as a legitimate practice. Born in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, February 22, 1808, he was the youngest son of William Pitt Atlee and grandson of the Hon. William Augustus Atlee, one of the early judges of the Supreme Court. The surgeon-to-be was at fourteen placed in a drygoods store, but being the boy he was naturally did not stay there but began to study medicine with his brother John at Lancaster. While a medical student he collected an herbarium of 400 specimens of Lancaster County plants which he subsequently presented to Pennsylvania College at Gettysburg. He took his diploma in 1829 from Jefferson Medical College, Philadelphia, and soon after married Miss Ann Eliza Hoff of Lancaster and settled in the village of Mount Joy, but in 1834 returned to Lancaster and practised there for ten years, always investigating and on the alert for fresh knowledge; the year 1845 saw him professor of medical chemistry in the University of Pennsylvania, but so many were the demands of private patients that he finalyfinally [sic] devoted himself wholly to these. While still in Lancaster he was known as a skilful and courageous operator and some of his cases published in the American Journal of the Medical Sciences caught the attention of his medical confreres. Before leaving Lancaster he did two ovariotomies, the first on March 29, 1844, and his three hundred and eighty-seventh on May 31, 1878. In 1845, after great research, he collected statistics of 101 ovariotomies, and published them in the American Journal of the Medical Sciences for April, 1845. Being associated with his brother in an ovariotomy in 1843, he became interested in the subject and in 1844 he writes concerning his own first case:

"In traveling westward on the Pennsylvania Central Railroad, soon after passing Landisville Station, a small stream is crossed, on the opposite banks of which stands a one-story brick tenement. It was here after many days and nights of intense anxiety that I first essayed this operation. It is the text for many, many thoughts. No one can know the mental and moral conflicts of that hour and I can not describe them. ... Although this effort was unfortunate I had weighed the matter well and my convictions were on the side of humanity and duty." The next operation was successful and the third, in Philadelphia, took place in 1849. Atlee says: "I found I had raised a hornets' nest. Ovariotomy was everywhere decried. It was denounced by the general profession. ... I was pointed at as a dangerous man, even as a murderer. ... A celebrated professor in his published lectures invoked the law to arrest me in the performance of this operation." The call to operate from many in the state who had faith in him alone gave him courage to face an amount of misrepresentation and abuse that would have