Page:Memoir of George McClellan MD.djvu/16

 and constant talkings, his perpetual prescribings, manipulatings, experimentings; his autopsies and operations, rapid! rapidly at it, and always at it! Book after book on medicine, he constantly and rapidly read and clearly and pleasantly detailed, making us listen to him. He provoked us to physiological experiments. Each corpse in the dead-house was marked by his autopsy and surgical operations;—thus he sometimes made trouble, easily quieted though, for the people even then seemed intuitively to know that McClellan was appointed to be their head Doctor, in spite of all the great doctors; and they let McClellan do any thing. In surgical matters he was ever active, testing and trying whatever he had read or heard of. On one occasion, I well remember, that, while reading, he jumped from his chair, and exclaimed, “Mott of New York,” it is said, “has taken up the innominata for aneurism, and I believe it!” Having immediately afterward left us a while and then returned, he exultingly exclaimed, “I've done it!” He had gone to the dead-house and there imitated Mott s operation on the subject. Such, in 1819–20, at the age of twenty-two years, was the deportment of McClellan in the Philadelphia Alms House.

Who of her students has more relieved the sickness among the poor of the county of Philadelphia? He had under his care, as junior, exclusively of other medical cases, fifty, sixty and seventy cases of typhus fever daily; and at the same time he was keeping a cat-watch on the phases of the numerous forms of syphilis, which filled the wards from the breaking up of the American army after the peace of 1814.

Who has reaped more experience from such varied and extensive clinic? made more autopsies? imitated on the subject more major operations, read more her