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cal schools. This admitted, and the alumni of his schools are ranked as (ad eundem) in all medical institutions, here and every where. First, then, McClellan as the surgeon.
The pre-eminent surgeon among us, when McClellan began his rapid career, was the late Doctor Philip Syng Physick. Having practically, as a dresser, learned the principles of Hunter, in St. George's hospital, London, and having introduced and successfully practised, taught and diffused them among us, Physick became the acknowledged father of American surgery. By correct medico-chirurgical doctrines, he rebuked the malpractice in the country, and by his peculiarly ingenious and judicious use of rest, position, and diet, prevented not unfrequently resort to the use of surgical operations.
There were instances then, however, of human suffering, and which doubtless have since increased in number, which demanded a bolder surgery than appears in Dorsey's Elements, and the operations and lectures of Physick. Cases such as those of Mary Rice, Dr. Graham, Brook, Wagonseller and Rhinehart, were not reached by American, some of them not by European surgery. The surgery of Physick's day was lithotomy with the gorget; and subordinately to it, as major operations, were performed the extraction of the opake lens; the tying of the carotid and internal iliac arteries; the extirpation of the entire mamma with the axillary glands; the division, in strangulated femoral hernia, of the stricture, then erroneously supposed to be seated in the inner single edge of the external oblique muscle of the abdomen, and since demonstrated to be seated lower down on the thigh, and made by the sigmoid flexure of the fascia lata. A case of amputation at the shoulder joint outside of army surgery, may be added to the major surgery of the time in this
