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Immediately on graduating, McClellan applied himself to the study of medicine, and entered the office of the late Doctor Thomas Hubbard, of Pomfret, one of the most distinguished surgeons of Connecticut, and subsequently, the Professor of Surgery in the Medical College of New Haven. He remained a year with him. In 1817, he came to Philadelphia to attend the Medical Lectures, confined at that time to the University of Pennsylvania; and to become the private pupil of the late lamented Doctor John Syng Dorsey, the nephew and associate of the celebrated Doctor Physick. Dorsey was the Professor of Materia Medica and, at the time of his unexpected death, of Anatomy in the place of the distinguished and beloved Doctor Wistar.
Dorsey's Elements of Surgery was the popular text book to his uncle's invaluable lectures on surgery, to which chair Dorsey himself had been an adjunct. The Professor and the community, therefore, regarded Dorsey as the chosen one to advance surgery from where Physick might leave it. But it appears that, in Providence, it was not Dorsey, but the New England youth in his office who, after Physick, was to become the great surgeon, and to make the then coming age a McClellan-epoch in American Surgery; as the then passing one was Physick's. Physick and Dorsey both predicted the future eminence of McClellan. The sagacious Doctor Physick pointed out McClellan when a pupil, as a remarkable young man, who would soon rival his masters in professional eminence and fame!
It was in 1818, during McClellan's pupilage under Doctor Dorsey, that my intimate acquaintance with him began; occurring as follows. As one of the resident medical students of the Hospital of the Philadelphia Alms House, I was making a morning routine of the medical wards, when an arm was shot into the bend of
