Page:Memoir of George McClellan MD.djvu/41

 crowded hours making him precociously experienced, he consequently distanced his contemporaries, and, as a youth, was found among his seniors and the master-spirits of his profession. McClellan, surely, “was not one of those who are appointed to lock their hands in those of their preceptors and predecessors, and tread the same bare path with neither change of motion nor ground, where each one leads as he is led.” His appointment seems rather to have been, to seek for Truth in Truth's own Book, which by God Himself was writ; wisely thinking it was fit, not to read comments only on it, but, “on the original to look.”

McClellan had his peculiarities. His sans ceremonie and en avant spirit seemed like obtrusiveness, insubordination and disrespect—and the infliction of rebuke has been doubtless sufficiently given!—Some of his best friends indeed would say that he was impolitic, and unwise, and, at times, even inconsiderate and imprudent. His bold and novel acts in surgery, to him not extraordinary matters, he would most freely communicate to all and every one in season and out of season, and in such a peculiar rapid incoherent manner, that often it displeased the lover of established usage and propriety. He sometimes thereby indeed also disturbed the ordinary course; and ruffled occasionally even those who seemed, at a very early period, to prophetically perceive that McClellan was not commissioned for an ordinary life. But we all did it ignorantly. Now, looking at the full cartoon of his character, we discern that his peculiarities were the guilelessness, unceremoniousness and unsuspiciousness of a child of genius perpetually burning with a chirurgical zeal. The peculiarities of one who ofttimes felt his spirit stirred against opprobrious disease stalking with defiance in the terrified presence of the medical profession, and who,