Page:Memoir of George McClellan MD.djvu/31

 and rooting it out, divided the arteries more rapidly than his assistants secured them, and the parts became deluged with arterial blood. He, with admirable presence and quickness, turned the patient over in his blood, cut down below the sigmoid flexure of the fascia lata, and secured the crural artery, the great trunk of all the divided and bleeding vessels. Then, replacing his patient, he completed the extirpation of the cancerous mass. In the deep, extensive wound, among the exposed muscles and the ligatures on arterial branches, the great ischiatic nerve was seen dangling about like a whip-cord.

From such data some estimate may be made of the amount of his surgical labours. Has any other surgeon in private practice, done an equal amount of surgery? It was not, however, on what McClellan did, bold as it was, that we are willing to rest his chirurgical character, but on his inherent capability of performing extraordinary and supposed impossible operations in surgery. Opposition and apparent impossibilities, the ordinary sedatives on human efforts, were to McClellan the needed stimuli to bring into action, for great deeds, his hidden reserved powers. As proof that his surgical capabilities were rather inherent than imposed by education, are the facts, that he operated boldly before his graduation,—that he extracted the lens as before mentioned, within a year after—extirpated the lower jaw within four years after, and in the seventh year of his becoming an M. D., as has been noticed, he performed the supposed impossible operation of extirpating the parotid gland. In view then of his chirurgical genius and his master-pieces in surgery, is not McClellan to be regarded, by the profession throughout the world, as one of her surgeons-in-chief?

McClellan sustained another character, and with equal