which have helped to render him immortal. Immortal he is in some fashion, and in spite of sneers. He was

a tireless collector and an inspiring teacher, and in such teaching Haller found his opportunity.

At eighteen Haller finished with distinction the prescribed course of medical studies, and passed the following year as a graduate student in London, Paris, and Basle; of such wanderings and studies there is no time to speak, but they were fruitful even to the youth not yet twenty. The chroniclers tell next of his return to Bern to become a practicing physician. There he worked for six years. He was not a success as a practitioner. The people of Bern were not used to that style of man and shrank from calling him in. But he studied. Ye gods, how he studied! He seems to have devoured the whole known range of medical authors. He read day and night at his meals, at the bedside, on foot and on horseback, in his travels and at home. He read, and he remembered what he read. He investigated, too. He explored those wonderful mountains among which he was born, and he came to know his Switzerland as no other man has known it. Besides medicine, he devoted himself to botany, and produced a great work on the Alpine flora. He was a poet.

Still he was without honor in his beloved fatherland. But other people honored him. The scientific world was looking toward him, was reading his books on anatomy, physiology, and botany, and his poems too. In those years men were establishing a new university at Göttingen, in the domain of that sturdy George II

who ruled England also; and casting about for professors in 1736, they called to them the young doctor of Bern. Haller went gladly, because he hungered for peace and for escape from Philistia. He went to Göttingen, to the chair of medicine, anatomy, surgery, and botany to a mighty task. For seventeen years in Göttingen his labors were unceasing. He executed faithfully the enormous duties of his office; he stimulated students as none but Boerhaave had stimulated them for centuries. Against modern teachers of science the reproach has been made that they are professional teachers and amateur scientists. One could bring no such reproach against Haller. He knew most things that had been written of ancient science, and winnowed the chaff. But, more than almost any other man who has shared our labors, he possessed that rare type of mind which adds to knowledge. He told men what he had discovered. He excelled as student, investigator, teacher; and during those years the university became famous through all lands.

He went to Göttingen at twenty-eight, and he left it at forty-five. Scientists deplored his leaving, and the great ones of the earth tried vainly to hold him back. He had been ennobled and courted by kings, and had sat in the seats of the mighty; but his was a homespun soul, quickly wearied by names and dignitaries. He threw over all, even the beloved society of scholars, and went back once more to his Switzerland. There he persisted in mighty works for twenty years

to the day of his death.

almost

Of what sort, then, were those works? How does

he touch us surgeons, and why do we claim him? Let a few halting words suffice as answer.

Most important of all, perhaps, he lectured on surgery for seventeen years. Two generations of students heard him. Fain would one have known that privilege. And he published two volumes, "Bibliotheca Chirurgica" (Bern, 1774-1775)—a great work dealing with the literature and history of surgery. Its like is to be found nowhere else. So he grouped together the accomplishments of the past and made them available for modern men. Those volumes alone rank him among the most valuable contributors to surgical science, and that though he was no craftsman and never operated, so far as we can learn. More important for us, however, than those great volumes was his teaching surgeons how to study, and his raising the profession from the degraded place in which popular opinion was holding it. In much of that he resembled and anticipated John Hunter. Haller grasped the wide significance of surgery and showed that it is far more than a mere craft. He brought to bear upon it a profound knowledge of anatomy, a keen-eyed devotion to physiology, and an enthusiasm for pathologic anatomy. He showed the absurdity of the mediæval custom which had divorced surgery from medicine and a liberal education, depriving it of the services of distinguished men and cultivated minds. By his example he did more even than by his preaching; he became a great experimental physiologist; through such endeavors he made possible the practical investigation of natural processes, and through such investigations