ADDRESS AT THE UNVEILING 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. In 1828, at the age of twenty-three, he took his degree in the third class which was graduated from the Jefferson Medical College. He opened an office first in Philadelphia, but soon removed to Easton. Nothing is more characteristic of the man than that, while waiting for practice, he spent hours daily in dissecting in a building he erected at the back of his garden, and provided himself with a subject by driving in a buggy all the way from Easton to Philadelphia and back with this gruesome companion; wrote a work on descriptive anatomy, which, however, he never published, and in eighteen. months after graduation had translated and published Bayle and Hollard's "General Anatomy"; Hatin's "Obstetrics"; Hildebrand on "Typhus," and Tavernier's "Operative Surgery"-works aggregating over eleven hundred pages. His motto was indeed "Nulla dies sine linea." His "stimulus" he himself says "was his ambition and his poverty." In 1833, five years after his graduation, he entered upon his career as a teacher-a career which continued for fortynine years, until within two years of his death. This took him first to Cincinnati as Demonstrator of Anatomy in the Medical College of Ohio. Those of my audience who left Cincinnati yesterday will be amused to learn that by stage, canal, and primitive steamboat, it took him thirteen days to reach the Queen City; and all of you will admire the pluck and courage of the young man when I add that his total worldly goods on reaching there were one hundred dollars. in his purse, a wife and two children in his family, but also in his breast a heart ready to grapple with any difficulties and a determination to conquer them all. In 1835 he became Professor of Pathological Anatomy in the Cincinnati Medical College, where he was a colleague of Daniel Drake, Willard Parker, and James B. Rogers, one of the famous four brothers, with a second of whom-Robert E. he was later a colleague in the Jefferson. His book on "Bones and Joints" had appeared in 1830, and next, as a result of four years' study and teaching, his "Elements of Pathological Anatomy" was published in 1839. It is strange to think that in a then small Western town in America a young teacher in a new medical school should have published the first book in the English language on pathological anatomy. No wonder, then, that it brought him fame and practice; that its second edition made him a member of the Imperial-Royal Society in Vienna; and that, thirty years afterward, Virchow, at a dinner he gave to its then distinguished author, should show it as one of the prizes of his library. In 1840 he went to the University of Louisville as Professor of Surgery, and, excepting one year when he was Professor of Surgery in the University of the City of New York, he remained there for sixteen years, happy in his family, his students, his flowers, and his generous hospitality. He and his colleagues-Drake and Austin Flint-soon made it the most important medical centre in the West, and he was in surgery the reigning sovereign. While there he published, in 1851, his work on the "Urinary Organs," and in 1854 another pioneer work, that on "Foreign Bodies in the Air-passages." His fame had become so great that he was invited to the University of Virginia, the University of Louisiana, the University of Pennsylvania, and other schools. But he was steadfast to Louisville until his beloved Alma Mater called him to the chair just vacated by Mütter. From 1856, when in his Introductory he said, "whatever of life and of health and of strength remain to me I hereby, in the presence of Almighty God and of this large assemblage, dedicate to the cause of my Alma Mater, to the interest of medical science, and to the good of my fellow-creatures," until he resigned his chair in 1882-nay, until his death in 1884-this was absolutely true. Even when the shadows of death were thickening he corrected the proof-sheets of two papers on "Wounds of the Intestines" and "Lacerations Consequent |