Page:American Medical Biographies - Kelly, Burrage.djvu/751

NAME MC CLELLAN 729 MC CLELLAN necticut, December 23, 1796, and died in Phila- delphia, May 8, 1847. His father, a descendant of an old Scotch family, was the principal of the Woodstock Academy, and here he obtained his preliminary education ; he graduated A. B. from Yale in 1816, and while there, formed a friendship with Prof. Silliman (q. v.), which led him to study natural science as well as the classics. He entered the office of Dr. Thomas Hubbard (q. V.) of Pomfret (subsequently professor of surgery in the Medical College of New Haven) ; after a year he moved, 1817, to Philadelphia and became a pupil of John Syng Dorsey (q. v.), Professor of Materia Medica and Anatomy, and entered the medical de- partment of the University of Pennsylvania. In 1818 he was resident undergraduate in the Philadelphia Almshouse. As a medical student he seemed to find himself, like so many before and since, opening up a vista of new interests in life, owing doubtless to the drawing vision of the direct application of the group of interesting scientific medical studies to the intensely practical personal prob- lems. It is said that he worked day and night in the dissecting room, that time-honored vestibule to so many surgical reputations. While at the almshouse he frequented the autopsy room, where he also utilized the abundant "material" to practise the various surgical operations which were then pretty nearly all on the periphery of the body. On reading that Valentine Mott (q. v.) had suc- ceeded in ligating the innominate artery for aneurysm, McClellan sprang from his seat, and made for the dead house, imitated the operation and came back to announce his success. He received his M. D. in 1819, with a thesis entitled "Surgical Anatomy of Arteries." At once beginning practice in Philadelphia he soon became known as a bold, talented sur- geon. He opened a dissecting room and gave private courses of lectures, his classes becom- ing so numerous as to require a larger room. As early as 1821, as one born before his time, he founded an Institution for the Dis- eases of the Eye and Ear. which lived for four years. With a few coadjutors he founded the Jefferson Medical College which received a charter from the legislature in 1825 ; here he was professor of surgery from 1826 until 1838, acquiring a very large private practice at the same time. The founding of this second medical school in Philadelphia was an unpopular act, and had a tendency to isolate its author, the friends of the University of Pennsylvania maintain- ing that there was not enough patronage for two schools, while McClellan prophesied that students would come in numbers proportioned to the increased facilities. A quarter of a century later (1849) Philadelphia actually en- rolled a thousand students instead of five hundred in 1825; in 1836 McClellan had three hundred and si.xty pupils in his school. In 1838 the trustees vacated all the professorships and excluded Dr. McClellan, for reasons un- known. Losing this position, McClellan at once pro- jected a third medical school! He obtained a charter for "The Medical Department of Pennsylvania College," having its collegiate department at Gettysburg, and with five asso- ciates began a course of lectures on surgery in Philadelphia, in November, 1839. The school, starting with one hundred pupils, en- dured up to the time of the civil war. McClellan was popular as a lecturer ; he had an eager, restless mercurial disposition. S. D. Gross says, "He was always brilliant, always interesting and instructive, but like Meigs, superficial and scattering, apparently without any definite aim, forethought or preparation," and "McClellan could never talk without having hold of his watch chain or some other object, perhaps a knife or a pair of scissors, much to the horror of the occu- pants of the first row of benches." He was one of the greatest men of a dis- tinguished coterie living in Philadelphia; "It is sufficient to say that he was one of the most able, talented and enterprising of the group, with hardly any one of whom he was on good terms either at the outset of his career or afterwards." "His impulsive dis- position often brought him into trouble; he lacked judgment, talked too much, and made everybody his confidant." "With many faults McClellan was unques- tionably a man of genius, quick to perceive and prompt to execute. With a better regu- lated mind he would have accomplished much greater ends and achieved a more lasting fame. Probably no man ever handled a scalpel with more dexterity. One day, as I know myself, he needed a catheter to relieve a woman of retention of urine. Did he send for one to the cutler or apothecary? No. "Sir," address- ing the husband, "bring me a quill," and in a few minutes the suffering creature was in elysium. On another occasion his saw broke in amputating a poor man's arm ; in a mo- ment the arm was bent over his knee and the bone snapped asunder." His colleague, S. G. Morton (q. v.), testifies to McClellan's coolness in critical operations, a