American Medical Biographies/Gross, Samuel David
Gross, Samuel David (1805–1884)
In the Woodlands Cemetery, Philadelphia, is an urn containing the ashes of Samuel D. Gross with this inscription in part: "A master in surgery. 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 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."
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. He was the son of Philip and Johanna Juliana Gross, being the fifth of six children—two girls and four boys. His early years under the wise training of a good mother, to whose memory he rightly pays a 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.
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' lexicon, in which all the definitions were in Latin, and Ross's grammar, constructed on the same principle. But to a master will such as his even 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 a 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 forty-nine years, till within two years of his death. This took him first to Cincinnati as demonstrator of anatomy in the Medical College of Ohio. In 1835 he became professor of pathological anatomy in the Cincinnati Medical College, where he was a colleague of Daniel Drake (q. v.), Willard Parker (q. v.), and James B. Rogers (q. v.), the last being one of the famous four brothers, with a second of whom—Robert E.—he was later a colleague in the Jefferson.
His book on the "Diseases and Injuries of the Bones and Joints" had appeared in 1830, and next, as a result of four years' study and teaching, his "Elements of Pathological Anatomy," two volumes, 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 (q. v.)—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 "Diseases, Injuries and Malformations of 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 (q. v.). 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," till he resigned his chair in 1882— nay, till 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 upon Parturition," his last labors in the service of science and humanity.
Three years after he entered upon his duties at the Jefferson he published his splendid "System of Surgery"—a work which, though in many respects now obsolete as to its pathology and its practice, is a mine of information, a monument of untiring labor, a textbook worthy of its author. It has been the companion and guide of many generations of students. It was translated into several foreign tongues and passed through six editions, the last appearing only seventeen months before his death. That even when verging toward fourscore he should have been willing to throw aside all his strong prejudices and accept the then struggling principles and practice of Listerism shows the progressive character of his mind and his remarkable willingness to welcome new truths.
From his removal to Philadelphia till his death, twenty-eight years later, his life can be summed up in a few sentences: daily labor in his profession, editorial labor without cessation; for some years in managing the North American Medico-Chirurgical Review, the successor of the Louisville Medical Review, of which he had also been the editor; article after article in journals; address after address; twenty-six annual courses of lectures on surgery to thousands of students; labors without ceasing till he wrapped the drapery of his couch around him and calmly passed away.
He married a lady of English descent of many accomplishments, who proved indeed a helpmate—one who, with hopeful courage, lightened the burden of care during the struggles of his early life, and enriched the glories of his triumphs in the meridian of his manhood. The best of fathers, he had in his later years of retirement the constant companionship and care of the most devoted of children. His son, Dr. Samuel Weissell Gross (q. v.), followed in the professional footsteps of his father.
As a surgeon Gross was painstaking, thorough and careful in his investigation of a case, skilful as an operator, and, having so vast an experience and equally extensive acquaintance with the wide literature of his profession, he was scarcely ever perplexed by the most difficult case and rarely at a loss as to the proper course to pursue in the most unexpected emergencies.
His influence on the profession was marked and wholesome. For many years he was almost always at the annual meetings of the American Medical Association and the American Surgical Association, was looked up to in both as the Nestor of the profession, and his papers and his wise words of counsel molded both the thought and the action of his brethren to a notable degree. He founded two medical journals, was the founder of the Pathological Society of Philadelphia and of the Philadelphia Academy of Surgery, the founder and first president of the American Surgical Association, and the first president of the Alumni Association of the Jefferson Medical College. It was peculiarly fitting, therefore, that these last two associations should unite in erecting and unveiling a bronze statue of one who did so much for them and whom they rightly delighted to honor. All who knew his tall, manly figure and his fine face will agree that the likeness is remarkable, both in pose and feature. Could I only get a glimpse of the right hand which holds his familiar scalpel I would recognize the man. Ex pede Herculem! Ex manu Gross!
As an author, his chief characteristics were untiring industry, comprehensiveness, methodical treatment of his subject, and a singular felicity of style, especially for one who acquired English so late and with difficulty. In fact, through life his speech, by a slight, though not unpleasant accent, always betrayed his German descent.
He blazed more than one new trail in the forests of surgical ignorance. In the early part, and even in the middle of the nineteenth century, it was rare for Americans to write medical books. The most they did was either to translate a French or a German work or to annotate an English one. He was one of the earliest to create an American medical literature of importance, and his works on the urinary organs, on foreign bodies in the air passages, and his text-book on surgery gave a position to American surgery abroad which we can now hardly appreciate; while, as already related, his pathological anatomy was the very first work in the English language on that most important branch. In 1861 he edited "American Medical Biography," and in 1887 his autobiography, with sketches of his contemporaries, was published.
His experiments and monograph on "Wounds of the Intestines" (1843) laid the foundation for the later studies of Parkes, Senn, and other American surgeons, and have led to the modern rational and successful treatment of these then so uniformly fatal injuries. He first advocated abdominal section in rupture of the bladder, the use of adhesive plaster in fractures of the legs, amputation in senile gangrene, and the immediate uniting of tendon to tendon when they were divided in an incised wound. Had he lived but a year or two longer, bacteriology would have shown him that scrofula was of tuberculous origin, and not, as he so firmly believed and vigorously taught, a manifestation of hereditary syphilis.
That his eminence as an author should have met with recognition from scientific organizations and institutions of learning is no cause of surprise. It made him the president of the International Medical Congress of 1876, a member of many of the scientific societies of Europe as well as of America, and won for him the LL. D. of the University of Pennsylvania, and I believe the unique honor in America of having had conferred upon him the highest degree of all three of the leading universities of Great Britain—Oxford, Cambridge, and Edinburgh. Indeed, it is both significant and pathetic to note that he laid down his pen just after recording in his autobiography the announcement of the honor which the University of Edinburgh intended to bestow upon him at its tercentenary celebration.
Dr. Gross first established the fact that Ephraim McDowell was the father of ovariotomy and published his findings in the "Transactions of the Kentucky State Medical Society" in 1852.
As a teacher, I can speak both with personal knowledge and enthusiasm. I can see his tall, stately form, his handsome face, his glowing features, his impressive gestures. He was earnestness itself. Filled to overflowing with his subject, his one desire was to impart to us as much of the knowledge he possessed as our young heads could hold. Repetition did not blunt the novelty nor time lessen the attraction of his theme. It always seemed as if he was telling us for the first time the new story of the beneficent work that surgery could do for the injured and the suffering. His whole heart was in his work. Especially did he inculcate the principles of surgery, for he was convinced, and rightly, that one who was thoroughly imbued with these could not go far wrong in his practice.