1884.] ♦ '^ [Da Costa. 



the successive classes the eminent professor subsequently taught, of how 

 immense had been his labors ; how he rose with the early dawn ; was 

 never seen without a book under his arm ; and had to be turned out from 

 the anatomical rooms by the wearied attendants when the hour for closing 

 them arrived. Certain it is he worked with his whole heart ; and when 

 he graduated in 1828 he was a noted man in his class. 



He began the practice of his profession in a little office in Fourth street, 

 in Philadelphia, and it is said that he had among tlie visitors who dropped 

 in on him his future colleague, Joseph Pancoast. More friendly visitors 

 than patients, it is to be feared, came to his rooms ; for after about two 

 years, his patrimony being nearly spent, he gave up the struggle in a great 

 medical centre and returned to Easton. But he carried with him evidence 

 of his love of learning and of his indomitable perseverance. lie had in the 

 short time translated from the French and the German works on General 

 Anatomy, on Obstetrics, on Operative Surgerj^ and he had published his 

 treatise on " The Anatomy, Physiology, and Diseases of the Bones and 

 Joints." He also took away with him a wife, a lady of English descent 

 of many accomplishments, wlio proved to him a true helpmate in his 

 arduous career. 



It was not long before Dr. Gross became a leading practitioner in the 

 flourishing little town of Easton, and his scientific knowledge was so well 

 appreciated that he was offered the Chair of Chemistry in the well-known 

 College there seated, in Lafayette College. He declined it ; but finding 

 that within him which impelled him to become a teacher, he relinquished 

 his growing practice to accept the demonstratorship of anatomy in the 

 Medical College of Ohio, at Cincinnati. His stay at Easton had not been 

 barren in additions to his scientific acquirements. He was constantly at 

 work in a dissecting-room which he built at the foot of his garden. Here, 

 too, he made a series of most careful observations on the rapidity with 

 which articles taken into the stomach are excreted by the kidneys ; and 

 investigated the temperature of the venous blood, which he found as an 

 average to be 96° Fahr. Further, he wrote a considerable part of a 

 treatise on descriptive anatomy, in which an English in place of a Latin 

 nomenclature was employed. This work was never finished ; the experi- 

 ments on the blood were published at Cincinnati in the second volume of 

 the Western Medical Gazette. 



As a demonstrator in the Medical College of Ohio, which he joined in 

 the autumn of 1833, Dr. Gross was very successful. But he did not long 

 remain in this position ; for after the work of two sessions he accepted the 

 Chair of Pathological Anatomy in the jMedical Department of the Cincin- 

 nati College. He threw himself with even more than his usual ardor into 

 the subject, and the number of specimens he studied and collected was 

 great, and the extent of his reading enormous. It was the pursuit of 

 Pathological Anatomy, on which he gave the first systematic course 

 delivered in this country, which made him so learned and skilled a surgi- 

 cal diagnostician, and he cherished through life a great devotion to the 



