ISM.] O*^ [Da Costa. 



translation of this little work appeared in 1S74, and is still in use among 

 the military surgeons of this enterprising nation. 



But the great work he completed in Philadelphia, one by which his 

 name will be long remembered, is his "System of Surgery," a work of 

 which the first edition was published in two very large, profusely illus- 

 trated octavo volumes in 1859, and which in 18S3 reached its sixth edition. 

 The labor on it, and on the successive editions which brouglit it up to its 

 present perfection, was enormous. Rising earl3^ working late, writing 

 with an assiduity that only a man of his wonderful physique could have 

 kept up, he generally gave from five to eight hours a day to the cherished 

 ]u-oject, no matter what the interruptions or whatever else he had to do. 

 Often, too, he would think out, while driving about town on his profes- 

 sional visits, the subject he was engaged on, and commit these thoughts 

 to paper, on his return home, before he took rest or food. 



The treatise on Surgery has become everj^where a standard authority. 

 "His work is cosmopolitan, the surgery of the world being fully repre- 

 sented in it," says the Dublin Journal of Medical Science. "Long the 

 standard work on the subject for students and practitioners," is the ver- 

 dict of the London Lancet of May of this year, on the twenty-three hun- 

 dred and eighty-two pages of the last edition. A Dutch translation was 

 issued in 1863. 



Dr. Gross always took the keenest interest in every question relating to his 

 own profession and in its honor and advancement. He was a very con- 

 stant visitor at Medical Societies in various parts of the United States and 

 in Great Britain. He was probably known personally to more physicians 

 and men of science than any other man in the United States, and wherever 

 he went he had many followers and admirers. Most of the prominent 

 surgeons of England were his personal friends. His interest in Medical 

 Societies never flagged, and late in life he became the founder of two very 

 flourishing ones, of the Academy of Surgery of Philadelphia and of the 

 American Surgical Association. He served as president of both. In 18(i8 

 we find him as President of the American Medical Association at its meet- 

 ing in Washington ; and in 1876 as the President of an International Medi- 

 cal Congress in session at Philadelphia. He was a member of most of the 

 noted medical societies of this country, of the Academy of Natural Sciences, 

 and of this Society. He was also a member of many learned societies 

 abroad ; among them, of the Royal Medical Chirurgical Society of Lon- 

 don, the CMinical Society of London, the Imperial Medical Society ot 

 Vienna, the Medical Society of Christiana, the Royal Society of Public 

 Medicine of Belgium. 



But his highest foreign honors were conferred upon him by the 

 three great English Universities. D.C.L. of Oxford, in 1872, at the 

 one thousandth commemoration of the University; LL.D. of Cambridge 

 in 1880, in the same list with Brown-Sequard, with Bonders, with 

 Joseph Lister; LL.D. of Edinburgh in absentia, a compliment the more 

 marked since it was only shared with Tennyson and a few others of 

 great distinction, — the renowned American Surgeon carried honors which 



