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THE PHILADELPHIA SCHOOL OF ANATOMY (1820-1875).

The middle building is the original one; the lower one to the right was added That to the left was a carpenter shop.

to the School later.

THE HISTORY OF THE PHILADELPHIA SCHOOL OF ANATOMY AND ITS RELATIONS TO MEDICAL TEACHING.*

EN and institutions alike are to be judged by two

standards: first, by the work they do themselves, and, secondly, by the work they train others to do, and thus prolong indefinitely their influence. Some are great in the one, solitary students, whose organizing ability and personal influence whether by mental or by actual contact is but little developed. Others live and die, leaving but little, it is true, that men may quote or name, but leaving a precious harvest of remoter influences on even a distant mental posterity. Some few are great in both. Great teachers are apt rather to excel in their personal magnetic influence on others, and the world owes more than it will ever know to their continuing, but untraced, influences.

Tested by either of these rules, the "Philadelphia School of Anatomy" has accomplished a not ignoble work. Within its walls, earnest, intelligent, laborious men of science have taught, experimented, and investigated, and published the results of their work in many a book and pamphlet and scientific paper, thus fulfilling the first test; while to judge it by the second, it is only necessary to point to the thousands of men who have studied and dissected here, and here begun their scientific lives, and are now spread all over the country, and in fact all over the world, doing the best of work as practitioners, teachers, writers, and original investigators.

* A lecture delivered, March 1, 1875, at the dissolution of the school. Reprinted with the kind permission of J. B. Lippincott Company.

Few schools of this sort have existed. Many, very many, dissecting-rooms and private anatomical schools have been established by individuals, to continue so long as they themselves chose to teach, and then to disappear; but this one has not been the creature of any one man. It has outlived not only its founder, but most of its earlier teachers. It has never been a chartered institution, or enjoyed the "jura, honores, et privilegia ad eum gradum pertinentia," but it has outlasted more than one such in this city alone. In this country I know of no similar school, and the only one in Britain which outstripped it either in age, in celebrity, or in influence was the Great Windmill Street School. Founded in 1770* by William Hunter, it boasted the names of both the Hunters, of Hewson, Cruikshank, Baillie, Wilson, Brodie, Sir Charles Bell, Shaw, Mayo, and Cæsar Hawkins, and came to an end in 1833, having existed for sixty-three years, a period only exceeding the life of this school by eight years.

The PHILADELPHIA SCHOOL OF ANATOMY was opened in the month of March, 1820 (nine years before the lately destroyed Medical Hall of the University of Pennsylvania was built), as the private anatomical school of Dr. Jason Valentine O'Brien Lawrance, under the name of the "Philadelphia Anatomical Rooms." It began at the upper end of Chant Street (then called College Avenue), on the north side, in the easternmost of the two buildings since used by the school. About this date, besides the anatomical rooms of the University, there were several private dissecting-rooms in this city, but they were on a different basis from this. In 1818 Dr. Joseph Parrish opened one almost in the rear of Christ Church and placed Dr. Richard Harlan in charge of it. In 1822 Dr. Thomas T. Hewson opened another over his stable in Library Street, next to the present Custom House, and afterwards, in 1829, in Blackberry Alley, in the rear of his house on Walnut Street above Ninth. Dr. George McClellan had another

* See p. 11.

But,

on Sansom Street above Sixth, and a fourth existed on the west side of Eighth Street above Jayne (then Lodge Alley), but under whose care I have not been able to discover. so far as I can learn, all of these were, mainly at least, for the office students of their proprietors, and they were all ephemeral. Lawrance, however, who was a great favorite with the students, at their request opened his school for all who might come, and so founded a school which has existed for fifty-five years, and has educated thousands of students and scores of teachers for their work.

Lawrance was born in New Orleans in 1791, and graduated at the University of Pennsylvania in 1815, after six years of study, at the age of twenty-four. He returned at once to his native city, and began the practice of medicine with his stepfather, Dr. Flood. But he thirsted for the scientific advantages he had found in this city during his student-life, and at the end of three years he sacrificed all his unusually brilliant prospects at home, and came to Philadelphia in 1818, when he at once renewed his scientific labors. At that time the University (then our only medical school) closed its doors in April, and they remained unopened till November, for our present admirable summer courses were begun only about ten years ago. To fill out this long hiatus Lawrance opened his school and gave a course on Anatomy and Surgery, which began in March, had a recess in August, and ended in November. He gave six lectures in the week, and his personal qualities, as well as the ease and perspicuity of his style as a lecturer, made his school a decided success. In the fall of the same year he became the assistant to Dr. Gibson, the Professor of Surgery in the University, and in 1822 he was also made the assistant to Dr. Horner, then Adjunct Professor of Anatomy. These positions, together with that of Surgeon to the Philadelphia Hospital, would have assured him in time a remunerative practice, but, like many another who has lived "the scientific life," he had to struggle on with but a

scanty income in the earlier days of his practice, and he died, before the reward had come, a victim to his zeal and devotion. While attending the poor in the Ridge Road District, during an epidemic of typhus fever, in the summer of 1823, he, who had lived among cadavera unharmed, was attacked by the disease, and died in August after a short illness.*

Like most of his followers in the school, not satisfied with teaching, he was also a frequent writer, as well as active in original investigations and experiments. In 1821 the "Academy of Medicine" was formed "for the improvement of the science of medicine," and he entered into its work with alacrity. The discovery of the absorbent vessels had led to the belief that they were the only channels of absorption until Magendie had then recently reasserted absorption by other channels, especially the veins. Dr. Chapman, then Professor of Practice and Physiology in the University, utterly rejected these views, and at his instance, and with his generous pecuniary assistance in the summer of 1822, Dr. Lawrance, assisted by Drs. Harlan and Coates, a committee of the Academy of Medicine, performed upwards of ninety experiments on living animals. Not satisfied with these, in the succeeding summer, with Dr. Coates, he repeated and varied them in a second series of over one hundred experiments, and he had begun also a third series to determine absorption by the brain, which was only cut short by his untimely death. The results were published in Dr. Chapman's journal, "The Philadelphia Journal of the Medical and Physical Sciences" (iii, 273, and v, 108 and 327), and they not only verified, but extended, Magendie's views.

In New Orleans he had recklessly exposed himself to yellow fever in making necropsies on putrid bodies. He investigated the subject still further in the epidemic of 1820, and left the most complete record of autopsies in this disease then extant.

* Obituary Notice, by Dr. Coates, Phila. Jour. Med. and Phys. Sci., 1823, p. 171, and Eulogium by Professor Jackson, ibid., p. 376.

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