ADDRESS AT THE UNVEILING
OF THE STATUE OF THE LATE
PROFESSOR SAMUEL D. GROSS, M.D.,
WASHINGTON, D. C., MAY 5, 1897.*

FELLOWS OF THE AMERICAN SURGICAL ASSOCIATION, MEMBERS OF THE ALUMNI ASSOCIATION OF THE JEFFERSON MEDICAL COLLEGE, AND FRIENDS:

O with me, your spokesman, to-day to the Woodlands Cemetery, that "God's Acre" or "Court of Peace," as the Germans so poetically call it,-which holds the dust of so many of the best dead of Philadelphia. Upon an urn there treasured you will read the following:

IN MEMORIAM.

Within this urn lie the ashes of

SAMUEL D. GROSS,

A Master in Surgery.

His life, which neared the extreme limits of the Psalmist, was one unbroken process of laborious years.

He filled chairs in four Medical Colleges, in as many States of the Union, and added lustre to them all.

He recast Surgical Science, as taught in North America, formulated

* Reprinted from the Transactions of the American Surgical Association, 1897.

The statue, in bronze, was erected by the American Surgical Association, the Alumni Association of the Jefferson Medical College and other friends of Professor Gross.

anew its principles, enlarged its domain, added to its art, and imparted fresh impetus to its study.

He composed many Books and among them

A SYSTEM OF SURGERY,

which is read in different tongues, wherever the Healing Art is practised. With a great intellect, carefully trained and balanced, he aimed with undivided zeal at the noble end of lessening human suffering and lengthening human life, and so rose to the highest position yet attained in science by any of his countrymen.

Resolute in truth, he had no fear; he was both tolerant and charitable. Living in enlightened fellowship with all laborers in the world of Science, he was greatly honored by the learned in foreign lands, and deeply loved at home.

Behind the Veil of This Life There is a Mystery Which He

Penetrated on the

SIXTH DAY OF MAY, 1884.

HIS MEMORY

Shall exhort and his Example shall encourage and persuade those who come after him to emulate deeds which, great in themselves, were all crowned by the milk-white flower of

A STAINLESS LIFE.

Who and what was the man of whom this was said? Samuel David Gross was born near Easton, Pennsylvania, July 8, 1805, and died in Philadelphia May 6, 1884, having nearly completed his seventy-ninth year.

His early years, under the wise training of a good mother, to whose memory he rightly pays just tribute, were spent amid the rustic labors and healthful pleasures of a Pennsylvania farm. This gave him a strong and vigorous body, without which he never could have performed a tithe of the labor which pre-eminently distinguished his long life. Before he was six years old he determined to be a surgeon, and early in his professional studies to be a teacher. Yet when he was fifteen he knew scarcely any English. Brought up among

the sturdy, honest, laborious Pennsylvania Dutch, he could speak that curious English-German. But his English, of which he became so fluent a master, and even pure German, which he began to study at the same time, were learned almost as foreign tongues and as a result of his appreciation at that early age of his need for a better and wider education. Even a still more striking evidence of the early development of the innate strength of his character and indomitable will is a story told in his autobiography. While a boy he became expert in playing cards; but finding that he was becoming so much fascinated by them that he replayed his games in his dreams, he resolved-fancy this in a boy not yet fourteen!to abstain from the game for twenty years--a vow he religiously fulfilled.

At seventeen he began the study of medicine as the private pupil of a country practitioner, but after learning some osteology with the aid of that tuppenny little compend, Fyfe's

Anatomy," and a skeleton, he gave up in despair, for again he found his intellectual tools unequal to his work. The little Latin he had was insufficient, and to understand the technicalities of medicine, Greek was a sine qua non. "This," he says, "was the turning-point of my life. I had made a great discovery-a knowledge of my ignorance, and with it came a solemn determination to remedy it." Accordingly he stopped at once in his medical career and went to an academy at Wilkes-Barre. He studied especially Latin and Greek, the latter by the use of Schrevelius's lexicon, in which all the definitions were in Latin, and Ross's grammar, constructed on the same principle. But to a master will like his such obstacles were not insuperable. To Greek and Latin, English and German, later years added also a knowledge of French and Italian.

At nineteen he began the study of medicine again—a study in which for sixty years his labors never for a moment ceased or even relaxed.