Part 7 (1/2)
In the winter of 1825-26, he attended the medical lectures in the University of Pennsylvania, with a view to improvement in his profession and in the art of teaching in it. While there he was invited by the late celebrated surgeon, George McClellan--to whom he had become favorably known--to take the chair of Anatomy in the new Jefferson Medical College, which McClellan and other members of the profession were engaged in organizing. This situation he occupied with success for two years, leaving it then to accept the chair of Anatomy in the School of Medicine of the University of Maryland in Baltimore, which had been vacated by Professor Granville Sharpe Pattison, in 1827. In Baltimore he soon acquired an extensive medical and surgical practice. On the death of Professor John B. Davidge he was transferred to the chair of Surgery.
In the language of his biographer and colleague, Samuel C. Chew, M. D.: ”In Baltimore he found a congenial home and when, at the age of fourscore, he was laid to rest among us, his name had been for a whole lifetime a household word throughout our State.”
When, in 1838, he accepted the inducement offered him by the Medical Faculty of Transylvania University to occupy the chair of the Theory and Practice of Medicine in their college at Lexington, Kentucky,[88]
during the four months of the winter course of lectures, he did not abandon his residence in Baltimore, but at the close of each session returned to his professional work in that city. It was there especially, as a professor and pract.i.tioner of surgery, that his life-work was done.
Doctor Smith was a man of remarkable mental activity, ”acuteness of perception and extraordinary power of adaptation to circ.u.mstances as they might arise, promptness of action and untiring industry.... And yet with his great gifts there was about him a remarkable simplicity of character and a transparent ingenuousness which was as incapable of affectation as of falsehood.”
His forte was Surgery, yet his lectures here on the Theory and Practice of Medicine were exceedingly clear and instructive. One little peculiarity of his may be noticed. He never lectured without a small whalebone rod or pointer. Without this in his hand he seemed to fear the loss of continuity of his ideas. As remarked by his biographer, ”his wand must always be at hand, for, like the magician's divining-rod, it seemed to have some mystic connection with the exercise of his powers.”
Early in his professional life he published his work on the _Anatomy of the Arteries_, and, in his later days, his work on _Fractures of the Lower Extremities_. He was engaged in the preparation of a work on surgery at the time of his death. His inventive genius, which was remarkable, was exhibited in several improvements of the instruments and apparatus of surgery, especially in his lithotome. In the practice of his son--Professor Alan P. Smith--in a series of fifty-two consecutive cases, without a single death, he used his father's lithotome in all but six cases. This great success he attributed mainly to the instrument. Another valuable improvement was his ”anterior splint.”
Doctor Smith died on the third of July, 1877, a few weeks after the completion of his eightieth year, full of honors. ”He has left behind him a record of a great surgeon, a brave and true citizen and magnanimous gentleman.”
ELISHA BARTLETT, M. D., ETC.
Born in Smithfield, Rhode Island, October 6, 1804. His parents, Otis and Waite Bartlett, were highly respectable members of the ”Society of Friends.” Their son, whose early education was under the auspices of this Society, possessed all the unostentatious virtues which characterized that sect. At the ”Friends' Inst.i.tution” in New York, under the celebrated teacher, Jacob Willett, he obtained a highly finished cla.s.sical education. He subsequently attended medical lectures in Boston and Providence and graduated as M. D. at Brown University, Providence, in 1826. Soon after graduation he spent a year pursuing medical studies under distinguished professors in Paris, France, and in cla.s.sical Italy.
In 1836, he was elected as the first mayor of the town of Lowell; was re-elected at the end of his first term, and afterward, in 1840, was honored by election to the Legislature of Ma.s.sachusetts. A _statesman_ and not a _politician_, he soon abandoned political life for the more congenial one of a medical teacher.
[89]”In 1828, he was offered the chair of Anatomy in the Medical School at Woodstock, Vermont, which honor he declined.
”In 1832, he was appointed to a Professors.h.i.+p in the Medical School at Pittsfield, Ma.s.sachusetts, which he held for several years. He also held a chair one year in the Medical Department of Dartmouth College, and for one year in Baltimore.
”In 1841, he was called to the chair of Theory and Practice of Medicine in the Medical Department of Transylvania University, which he occupied for three years with ability and success.”[90]
After a visit to Europe he again returned, in 1846,[91] to the Transylvania Medical College, teaching in the same chair for another three years.
”He subsequently delivered a course of medical lectures in the Medical School at Louisville, giving also summer lectures at Woodstock, Vermont, and other places--his instruction being highly appreciated by his colleagues and most acceptable to his students.
”At length he was called to an important professors.h.i.+p in the College of Physicians and Surgeons of New York. Here he continued for three years, when, compelled by failing health, he abandoned the position to retire to his paternal acres in Smithfield--to die, after a long and lingering illness, on July 19, 1855.”
His disease--partial paralysis of the lower extremities, with torturing neuralgia and finally softening of the brain, the result of lead poisoning, caused--as he believed, and as he informed the writer--by the use of water which had pa.s.sed for a considerable distance through leaden pipes.
The beautiful and sterling traits of the character of Doctor Bartlett are most happily portrayed by the distinguished medical professor and poet, Oliver Wendell Holmes, in the _Boston Medical and Surgical Journal_, August 16, 1855, from which we make a few extracts, viz:
”Hardly any American physician was more widely known to his countrymen, or more favorably considered abroad, where his writings had carried his name. His personal graces were known to a less extensive circle of admiring friends.... To them it is easy to recall his ever-welcome and gracious presence. On his expanded forehead no one could fail to trace the impress of a large and calm intelligence.... A man so full of life will rarely be found so gentle and quiet in all his ways.... The same qualities which fitted him for a public speaker naturally gave him signal success as a teacher. Had he possessed nothing but his clearness and eloquence of language and elocution, he could hardly have failed to find a popular welcome....
He had a manner at once impressive and pleasing, a lucid order which kept the attention and intelligence of the slowest hearer, and attractions of a personal character always esteemed and beloved by students.... Yet few suspected him of giving utterance in rhythmical shape to his thoughts or feelings. It was only when his failing limbs could bear him no longer, as conscious existence slowly retreated from the palsied nerves, that he revealed himself freely in truest and tenderest form of expression. We knew he was dying by slow degrees, and we heard from him from time to time, or saw him always serene and always hopeful while hope could have a place in his earthly future ...
when to the friends he loved there came, as a farewell gift, ... a little book with a few songs in it--songs with his whole warm heart in them--they knew that his hour was come, and their tears fell fast as they read the loving thoughts that he had clothed in words of beauty and melody.
”Among the memorials of departed friends.h.i.+ps we treasure the little book of 'songs,' ent.i.tled _Simple Settings in Verse for Six Portraits from Mr. d.i.c.kens' Gallery_, Boston, 1855--his last present, as it was his last production.”
DOCTOR LOTAN G. WATSON,
Of North Carolina, filled the chair of Theory and Practice in Transylvania in the sessions of 1844 and 1845 only. He came highly recommended as a physician of extensive practice of not less than twenty years. ”A gentleman of undoubted talents. He has the reputation of bringing to his cases a great affluence of resource and fertility of expedient, regulated by a judgment discriminative and safe. He writes with facility and elegance, and converses with fluency, animation, and impressiveness. He thinks clearly and communicates his ideas with facility and a corresponding clearness.” Extract from letter of Senator W. P. Mangum, of North Carolina.
LEONIDAS M. LAWSON, M. D.,
Who filled the chair of General and Pathological Anatomy and Physiology in the Medical Department of Transylvania University from 1843 to 1846, inclusive, was born in Nicholas County, Kentucky, September 10, 1812. He had received his medical degree from this same department of Transylvania in 1837.