He continued busy almost to the end of his life, especially with his writing. His last surgical paper was published in May, 1855, just a year before his death, which closed a brief and painful illness. His real work had been done long since, however. It is not a life which lends itself readily to eulogy. It was not full of striking events and dramatic incidents. Except for the ether business no event stands out conspicuously; and in that he but lent his name, as, indeed, but for him some other might have done. But it was his long and useful career that made him eminent his services in helping to found a great hospital, his establishment of sound surgical methods, his correct and methodical teaching, his faithful searching out of the truth, his insistence upon drill, his contempt for the brilliant superficial. All these things were very important, and among us helped to set a new standard, up to which we have been growing ever since. He was indeed a man whose work our community could ill have spared; and though he was succeeded by the meteoric Henry J. Bigelow, the younger man would have found for his endeavors a very different field, had it not been so carefully and faithfully tilled through toilsome years by Warren. and son, JACOB BIGELOW: A SKETCH1 THE two most conspicuous names in Boston medicine of the last century are those of Jackson and Bigelow. Of the former, this society heard something a few years since from my friend Dr. Osler. The Jacksons, father the son cut off in his early youth, and memorialized by his distinguished father, fill a unique place in our annals. The Bigelows, father and son, both lived long and active professional lives, their working years covering in all more than eight decades. To the younger generation, the distinguished son, surgeon and teacher, Henry J. Bigelow, is the better known. But I doubt if in future annals his fame will eclipse that of his father. - Recently, we have received a biography of the younger Bigelow from the pen of his colleague, Richard M. Hodges, to me one of the best medical memoirs known. The story of the father's life has never been fully written. Obituary notices, and a brief laudatory sketch by a layman friend we have, and his own writings. From such insufficient data I have attempted to collect and compress into a short paper what little I may of this distinguished man. What is it that he did? On what does his fame rest? Why do our seniors still name him with respect and almost with reverence? 1 Read before the Johns Hopkins Hospital Historical Club, October 14, 1901. Men who knew him, tell this of him He was a wonderful old man. His mind was alert to the very end. He was full of wit, humor, and satire. He was wise, acute, profound. He was one of the ablest practitioners we ever had. But there was more than this in it all. What the man did impressed enormously the community in which he lived, the source of the impression being often almost unrealized. The story of his life, briefly and simply related, is a stimulus in itself, and tells us of the development of medicine and scientific thought through many of the transitional formative years of the century. Jacob Bigelow was born on the 27th of February, 1787, and died on the 10th of January, 1879, nearly ninety-two years old. His life embraced all the greatest events of our country's history - from the adoption of the Federal Constitution, through the Reconstruction days. And no man more than he grasped the meaning of all that wonderful era. Born at a time of political expansion, he came to know personally all the foremost figures of the age among us. John Adams complimented him, Thomas Jefferson corresponded with him, Daniel Webster was a fellow-townsman, Lincoln and Grant were familiar to his riper years; and though with politics he never had active concern, he was always an appreciative student of national development, and in his place was an aggressive and liberal promoter of reforms - municipal, social, educational, and scientific. He was of New England ancestry. His great-great great-grandfather came from England about 1640 and settled in Watertown, Massachusetts. In that vicinity the family always lived. His father, Jacob also, was a Congregational minister in Sudbury. The younger Bigelow's childhood was passed in the country at farmwork and scant schooling. Painfully, his father was enabled to send him to Harvard College, where he was graduated in 1806. During these early years, he was not slow in the pursuit of useful knowledge. Nature always charmed him, and in the study of her mysteries he was an eager scholar. Flowers, the succession of crops, the building of the trees, the changes of the seasons, meant always more to him than to the average, simple, country lad. In college he was not unknown. In his brief autobiographical notes, which end with his middle life, he tells us that he was a member of a "Theological Society, which was very good; a Porcellian Club, which was very bad; a Phi Beta Kappa Society, intended to be composed of the best scholars; and a Navy Club, which was above suspicion as containing the worst." He was the poet of his commencement day. Like Astley Cooper, Bigelow had no special "call." Beyond the fact that he had an inborn love of nature, there was nothing to lead him to scientific pursuits. The choice between law, theology, and medicine exercised him not a little, and he tells us that his opinions were at last confirmed by the anatomical lectures of one of the earliest and most forceful surgeons of our country, John Warren. Were it not for wandering too far afield, it would be interesting here to relate Bigelow's impressions and opinions of that distinguished man, the first of a wellknown family of Boston surgeons; for he used often through life to speak in glowing and delighted language of the great fluency and charm with which Warren lectured. On the choice of a profession, Bigelow has many interesting things to say; and, in his later years, contrasts eloquently the great range of pursuits which became open to aspiring youth, as compared with the narrow things of his boyhood. "Few young men," he says, "would then have cast their fortunes on the uncertain chance of finding occupation and livelihood in the almost unexplored paths since successfully pursued by multitudes of educated aspirants - in the capacities of engineers, mechanical and chemical manufacturers, artists, authors, editors, lecturers, and teachers of the higher class. Is it not possible that future learned professions will spring up for the future wants, luxuries, and perversities of mankind? Why should not cookery, which caters to the gratification of one sense, take its place as a fine art by the side of music and painting; and why should not a refined and cultivated anæsthesia be so varied in its applications and degrees as to exempt mankind from their griefs and grievances by an artistic application?" In 1806 the status of medical education in this country was almost elementary. Aside from the New York, Philadelphia, and Harvard schools, there was no medical college of high standing, and even they offered |