348 HENRY JACOB BIGELOW. 



tion is generally recognized as one of the great improvements of 

 modern surgery. I myself bad the opportunity of observing some 

 of his experiments, and well remember the patient and persevering 

 labor they involved. I recollect, more especially, the pains he took 

 in getting plaster casts of the bladder and the urethra, and I learn 

 from others that he bestowed the same care upon the instruments he 

 contrived or adapted for the rapid removal of a calculus, by the me- 

 thod to which he gave the name of Litholapaxy. 



Among Dr. Bigelow's other professional labors, I may mention his 

 suggestion of a new refrigerant for producing local anfcsthesia. This 

 was brought forward in an article published in the Boston Medical and 

 Surgical Journal, in 1866, under the title, " Rhigolene, a Petroleum 

 iVaphtha for producing Anaesthesia by Freezing." ^ 



A new anatomical observation was published by Dr. Bigelow in the 

 same journal, in the year 1875, "• Turbinated Corpora Cavernosa." 

 The anatomical expert will recognize at once the analogy hinted at in 

 this designation. The suddenness with which the air passage through 

 the nostrils will become obstructed, and the equal suddenness with 

 which it will be cleared, without the removal of any secretion, might 

 well suggest the idea that some kind of erectile tissue was concerned 

 in this familiar phenomenon. Dr. Bigelow examined the mucous 

 membrane, and detected a spongy tissue with large cells, capable of 

 being rapidly filled with l)lood and as rapidly emptied, — a structure 

 resembling that of the corpora cavernosa, as the name he gave it im- 

 })lies. This is one of the ver}'^ few additions to human descriptive 

 anatomy which have been made in this country. 



Dr. Bigelow was not a collector of books, nor a great reader. He 

 opened a book as he would open a jackknife, to use it for some 

 special purpose, which having accomplished, he shut it up and had 

 done with it. I may be allowed to quote my own words, as they 

 stand in the report of the memorial meeting held shortly after his 

 decease by the Boston Society for Medical Improvement : — 



" He read men and women as great scholars read books. Pie took 

 life at first hand, and not filtered tlirough alphabets. He was not 

 ashamed of his want of erudition, and would ask questions on matters 

 with which he was unacquainted with the simplicity of a child. l>ut 

 he would get what he wanted out of a book as dexterously, as neatly, 

 as quickly, as a rodent will get the meat of a nut out of its shell. In 

 the address before spoken of, on the use of imagination in science, he 

 handled his rapidly acquired knowledge of the great authors he cited 

 so like an adept in book lore that one might have thought he was 



