Page:American Medical Biographies - Kelly, Burrage.djvu/854

NAME MUMFORD 832 MUMFORD tice of Surgery," "One Hundred Surgical Problems," and "A Doctor's Table Talk." He edited the "Harvard Medical School : a His- tory," in 190S, with Dr. Thomas F. Harring- ton. Medical history appealed to him strongly and besides sundry articles on bygone wor- thies he wrote the chapter on the history of surgery in Dr. Keen's "System of Surgery." His more fugitive medical writings cover nearly the whole range of surgery. Dr. Mum- ford had none of the literary slovenliness so often found in medical writings. To him good style was quite as important as good matter and he took extraordinary pains to use the right word. His style was alive and indi- vidual, a style one remembers with pleasure, a style that makes his "Practice of Surgery" read almost like a novel — no mean achieve- ment. As an example of his happy facility in using words I will quote a few lines from a letter to his class secretary written in 1910: "So the simple record runs on, telling of mild employments in the Harvard Medical School and elsewhere. I like teaching: stu- dents pass me out the usual compliments due to credulous senility (he was then 47). I like practising surgery; patients toss me roses mingled with thorns. I like writing about people and things^ for the reviewers deal me comments which chasten the soul. Altogether, life continues a pleasant experience." But perhaps Dr. Mumford's greatest claim to be remembered is not for what he accom- plished but for what he hoped and tried to accomplish and did not, for many of the things he had most at heart are now be- ing gradually worked out much as he hoped they might be. He was a man before his time and essentially a reformer, not of the irritating, aggressive type to whom we surren- der out of sheer boredom, but the quiet, per- sistent kind of man who sees clearly what he feels ought to be done and keeps his goal steadfastly in mind in spite of hostile criti- cisms and constant failures. He was firmly convinced of three things: first, that in many cases Religion is quite as potent a remedial agent as is Medicine, or rather that in many cases the clergyman might cooperate with the doctor to the mani- fest benefit of the patient. Hence he became closely identified with the "Emmanuel Move- ment" led by Rev. Elwood Worcester, a movement the success of which has been by no means commensurate with the hopes Dr. Mumford held. Now, however, that the fires of battle no longer rage, many of us are be- ginning to have a much more just view of what the movement stands for. Secondly, as far back as 1906 he foresaw that the time was coming when great medical schools like Harvard should have professors whose chief business was to teach and to whom teaching was not merely incidental in a very busy life. The idea then seemed Utopian and Mumford was rather laughed at for entertain- ing it, yet now, after his death, it is in the way of accomplishment. The. third and probably most profound con- viction in his life was that while the rich and the very poor get good medical care there is no provision under our modern conditions by which the man of slender purse, yet by no means a "charity patient," can obtain the services of really competent specialists ; to this end in 1910 he devoted much thought and labor for the establishment of a fully equipped modern cooperative hospital for peo- ple of moderate means, of which he was to be the surgical head with Dr. R. C. Cabot in charge of the medical side, and under them a staff of good specialists. It was perhaps the deepest disappointment of Mumford's life that this scheme got no furthier than its prospectus. Undeterred, however, by this failure, he soon embarked upon a cognate undertaking of far more grandiose scope. Ill health rendered it necessary for him to re- sign from the Massachusetts General Hospital and in 1912 he accepted an invitation to be- come physician in chief to the Clifton Springs (N. Y.) Sanitarium. Understanding that he was to be given a practically free hand he set about gathering around him a body of brilliant, well equipped younger men, hoping to change the time-honored Sani- tarium from a resort more or less for vale- tudinarians into an actively constructive in- stitution, not for the very rich, perhaps, but primarily for the only moderately well-to-do, where at no ruinous expense they could com- mand the very best medical care. Differences of opinion as to policies led, however, to his resignation some two years later, with his dream only partly realized. Meanwhile, dur- ing his short stay at Clifton he had made a host of friends and his appointment as trustee of Hobart College is only a token of the esteem in which he was held in Western New York. I have referred to Dr. Mumford's bad health. The last dozen years of his life were one constant struggle with a failing heart, un- der stress that most men would have accepted as a stern warning that it was time to retire. After each bout with his enemy Mumford re-