Page:Memoir of George McClellan MD.djvu/22

, and her countenance, as is shown by this drawing, resumed its natural appearance. But after several months, cancerous disease appeared in the glands and new parts, to terminate the life of this interesting patient. This issue is truly sad: nevertheless, the operation bespeaks the great surgeon.

McClellan's medico-chirurgical judgment, though censured and unsupported at the time, was correct. The censure was based on the belief that ossification proceeds from successive depositions within the periosteum; and that therefore bone, if by any surgical operation or otherwise removed with the periosteum, cannot be regenerated. McClellan's reasoning on the case was, that as granulations become vessels, nerves, and muscles, they, in their appropriate place, will become tendon, ligament, and also bone. The cases of Decker, Guernesy, Bel-main, Rargerus, Else and Mott were on record, showing that ossification had followed the removal of portions of the lower jaw. These facts, which had remained a long time isolated and useless, sustained his reasoning, and were enough to free his generalizing mind from the prevailing error on the subject of the reproduction of bone; and enabled him to enrich the profession with the principle that the inferior maxilla is reformed from an old fragment, without a pre-existing periosteal membrane, and to establish it by an operation bolder than those of his predecessors, performed by him subsequently several times with entire success.

A third point of improvement in surgery by McClellan, is that of not shocking the system in the extirpation of large or deep-seated tumours, by the serious preliminary operation of tying a main artery, as for example the carotid, when its branches are involved in the disease.

Convinced that this practice, induced by a