Page:Famous Living Americans, with Portraits.djvu/364

 JOHN B. MUBPHY 341 to pursue an idea or plan to its fruition. He was a teacher, a friend, and an inspiration to all true students. His influence for good was overpowering and he exercised a greater force in the production of the present high standard of surgery and medicine in the middle west than any other man. In his early medical practice, Dr. Murphy fortunately be- came associated with a man of sterling worth, Dr. Edward W. Lee, a graduate of the Medical Department of Dublin Uni- versity, a student, an active practitioner, possessed of the keenest sense of obligation to his patients' welfare, of a pro- found respect of the rights of others, with a type of integrity which no price could divert, even in thought. He had a most wholesome appreciation of the advantages which his adopted country afforded and was unfaltering in the fulfillment of his obligations to its laws and customs. He used on many occa- sions the expression, * * I would be a base ingrate if I were dis- loyal to any of the exactions of the Nation or State which afforded me such opportunities through its Constitution and Government. ' ' Individuality and integrity were the ideals of his existence. He never ** worked.*' The continued and con- scientious performance of his duties was an act of love, not labor. He was affectionate, generous, strong, and upright. The fifteen years' close professional association with this man was an enviable opportunity. Passing from the loc€il to the world educational influence, three master teachers are constantly referred to by Dr. Mur- phy : Professor Bilroth of the Vienna Medical School, who in a few words and with a few strokes of crayon could express the cellular pathology of the disease under consideration in such a way that one appreciated from his lecture and the demonstration on the blackboard the microscopic changes in the tissue. He had the faculty of teaching surgery in its highest sense. In Berlin he attended the lectures of Professor Schroeder in the Frauen Klinik. He was a most forceful teacher, exact operator, inspiring lecturer and inquisitive investigator of the causes of disease in the individual. One could not leave his operating room without feeling that he was a part and parcel