American Medical Biographies/Peters, George A.
Peters, George A. (1859–1907)
Clever anatomist, surgeon and teacher, George A. Peters, of Toronto, ended an all too short life March 13, 1907, at the age of forty-seven. He was born July 10, 1859, in Eramosa, Wellington County, Ontario, and his boyhood was spent on his father's farm. Losing his father and mother at the age of fourteen, it fell to him, as the eldest of four children, not only to make his own living, but to care for two half-brothers and a half-sister. This he did with such success that they all had a high school education, and his brothers and he became graduates in medicine at the University of Toronto.
By hard work in 1881–2, George succeeded in taking the three-year course at St. Catherine's Collegiate Institute in one year and entered the University of Toronto, where he received the degree of M. B. and a Starr gold medal in 1886. After serving for a year as house surgeon in the Toronto General Hospital and acting for several months as medical superintendent of this institution, he was appointed demonstrator of anatomy in the recently organized faculty of medicine of the University of Toronto, and at the same time began practice. In 1889–90 he spent eight months in England and passed two examinations for fellowship in the Royal College of Surgeons, being for several years the only Canadian who possessed this qualification.
In 1890 Dr. Peters returned to Canada and was appointed associate professor of clinical surgery in his alma mater, not confining his practice solely to surgery, however, until 1900. His knowledge of anatomy, which was very accurate and extensive, his ability to devise new methods of operating and his boldness in entering new fields of surgery rendered him soon a leading surgeon of his city.
Quite the best appreciation of his abilities in this line is that conveyed in the words of Professor I. H. Cameron, formerly one of his teachers of surgery, and subsequently his colleague as the head of the surgical department in the University: "His surgical alertness and inventiveness were attested by his various modifications of the usual operations of plastic surgery (in which he excelled), by the coat-sleeve amputation of the appendix, which he was the first to do, by the transplantation of the ureters into the rectum in cases of ectopia vesicae which he made his own, and by the method of proctoplasty and suspension in cases of procidentia recti. His mechanical ingenuity was shown by his modification of Aikin's splint for fracture of the upper arm, his wrench for club-foot, his device for making plaster casts of the living head and neck by a preliminary spray of paraffin."
In 1899 he married Constance, the youngest daughter of the Honorable Sir William R. Meredith, Chancellor of the University. She and two children survived him.
Brilliant as a surgeon, he was not less so as a teacher. Extremely lucid in his ideas, with a remarkable capacity for seizing the general principle in a mass of facts, and with a terseness of speech that was his own, he never failed to win and keep the attention of students whether in the lecture room or at the bedside clinic. It was his great efficiency as a teacher, as well as his standing as a scientific surgeon, that led to his appointment as professor of surgery and clinical surgery when the amalgamation of the faculty of Trinity Medical College with that of the University of Toronto took place. Very soon thereafter, however, the indication of the condition, which ultimately cut short his life, manifested itself and he was unable to continue his life work.
Dr. Peters was not a ready or voluminous contributor to the literature of surgery, and one reason for this was his rather exacting taste for clearness and terseness of language, and he, therefore, often recast completely a manuscript before it finally left his hands. Every statement that he made was carefully thought out. Amongst the more notable articles which he prepared are those on "Surgery of the Rectum and Anus" in the "International Text-Book of Surgery," edited by Gould and Warren, and "Inflammatory Affections of Bone" in Bryant and Buck's System of Surgery.