Page:Memoir of George McClellan MD.djvu/39

 measure of its full development? New York and Baltimore, whose schools for a few years were prospering, did not then know how the reversion to Philadelphia was to be effected. In the course and by the Orderer of events, the McClellan class became the Medical Department of Jefferson College; and he, for fifteen years, the lecturer extraordinary,—at times on surgery, and at times on both anatomy and surgery. Since then it has commanded and received for its professorships the best talents of the country, and has become a great school.

Was the location of it in Philadelphia an impropriety? Shippen, in view of the spirit of his first introductory, could not consistently have thought so. The state elsewhere can furnish no requisitions and appliances for medical instruction. The unprecedented growth of the scion in the same soil, has not rendered less fruitful the deeply rooted mother. To change the metaphor, the two schools, like two magnets, collected more than double the amount of pupils,—fulfilling thereby, with increase of zeal, usefulness and reputation, the object of our alma mater, and the liberal expectations of the American medical patriarch.

Another school was to be formed by McClellan. In 1838 his labors as a teacher were restricted again to those of a private class. Rich in medical science and general literature, and more than ever Hippocratic and Hunterian in his views, he enforced, with more zeal than ever, his favorite common-sense inductive system. His class consequently prospered, and in 1839, became, with a full faculty on the six cardinal branches, The Medical Department of Pennsylvania College, located at Philadelphia.

I need not notice the evidence that this third school is also both well timed and well placed. During four years it enjoyed unprecedented prosperity—its class averaged