FIGHTING THE INSECTS 



nine a. m. to four p. m., so that a medical student after a hard 

 day's work had to eat a hurried dinner and go to a four-thirty 

 lecture. By the time he left the dissecting room it was usually 

 nearly midnight, and he was a very tired man. 



There were some mighty good men in the Faculty in those 

 days. The lecturer on anatomy was no less a person than Elliot 

 Coues, a retired army surgeon, and a brilliant man who had 

 made his reputation largely on his work in comparative anatomy. 

 A. F. A. King was the lecturer on gynecology and obstetrics. 

 He was a first-rate man of a speculative turn of mind, whose 

 fame today rests largely on the fact that as early as 1881 he 

 published a long essay seeking to prove that malaria was a 

 mosquito-born disease. This essay was theoretical, not based on 

 actual experimentation, but it brought together a host of facts 

 and marshalled them in logical order. I remember very well that 

 when he read his first paper on this subject before the Philo- 

 sophical Society of Washington, he came down to Professor 

 Riley's office and discussed the matter with Riley and myself. 

 To my eternal shame, I confess that we both pooh-poohed the 

 idea, and as a matter of fact, no one took any stock in it until 

 Ross's triumphant demonstration in Calcutta seventeen years 

 later. 



Then there was Daniel Webster Prentiss, lecturer on Materia 

 Medica; George W. Acker, teacher of the microscope; J. Ford 

 Thompson, lecturer on surgery, and a brilliant surgeon. I think, 

 that I will be pardoned if I tell a little yarn at this point. 



A group of us, all students, were told to go to a certain hospital 

 to watch certain operations. The first operation, which was very 

 gory, was the excision of one of the super-maxillary bones, and it 

 was done by a surgeon known among the boys as the "butcher." 

 Half sickened at the sight, we gathered around another table, 

 fearful of what we were going to see. This time the operation was 



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