last and most illustrious representative in this country of the surgery of the eighteenth century. He was a pupil of Mr. Nourse, one of the Surgeons of St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, and served that noble institution, man and boy, as he used to say, for nearly fifty years. A gentleman by birth, education and habits, Pott was systematically opposed to the coarse and harsh modes of treatment, and the yet frequent use of the actual cautery, which prevailed at the time of his entering the profession, and he introduced more rational as well as more lenient methods. At the age of forty-three he had the misfortune to meet with a bad compound fracture of his leg, and by the admirable presence of mind with which he summoned his experience to his aid, succeeded in saving the limb. It was to this accident, or rather the confinement which it occasioned, that we are indebted for the stores of information upon the most important subjects which his works contain; for the reception given to the ‘Treatise on Ruptures,’ composed during that period, probably first discovered to himself the powers which he possessed, and doubtless operated as an incentive to his many subsequent publications.
The works of Pott are so well appreciated, form so essential a part of every surgeon’s library, and, indeed, were so long the text-book of the profession, that it would be as needless to recapitulate them as to discuss their general and singular merits. The highest
