8 THE MICROSCOPE. 
thereof, rather than the fitness of the latter for the task in hand. 
Feeling this, and knowing the difficulties in the way of preparing a 
memoir worthy of the subject, it is with considerable diffidence that 
the work is undertaken. Its meagreness of detail must be ascribed 
to the author’s lack of time and facilities for collating, and not to 
any deficiency of matters worthy of chronicling concerning the sub- 
ject of the sketch; since, though a young man as yet, the life of Dr. 
Lewis has been crowded with incident and adventure, with work and 
experiences that might well round out the history of one far older in 
years, as men count them. 
He was born March 26, 1856, in the little Connecticut town 
of Vernon Centre, where his father, Dr. J. B. Lewis, was then living 
and practising medicine. His parents on both sides were of old 
Puritan stock, and from them he inherited not only a sound body 
and a good constitution, but those qualities of mind which are 
preéminently characteristic of the New England American—an 
inflexible straightness and directness of purpose, a never-flagging 
energy, and that keen perception of the motives of men and drift of 
events usually termed “judgment.” 
The early education of the boy had scarcely commenced when 
the political events of 1860-61 culminated in the firing upon Fort 
Sumpter and the war between the states. Dr. Lewis, his father, was 
one of the earliest to tender his services to his country, and was 
appointed a surgeon in the Union army. In order to be near him, 
the household at Vernon Centre was broken up, the boy removed 
from school, and the family carried with the doctor to “the front.” 
Too young to bear a gun, but filled with martial ardor, young 
Lewis attached himself to a drum corps and for three years served 
as “drummer boy” in the Army of the Potomac, and saw an amount 
of active service and actual war that would serve, could it be divided 
up, to make the stock in trade of a whole regiment of post-bellum 
veterans and pension hunters. 
Being near his father, and at the very front, here too the boy 
took his first lessons in surgery and daily witnessed a multitude of 
operations, many of them of the highest grade of military surgery. 
As he has frequently remarked to the writer, his earliest recollec- 
tions pertain to this branch of the art and science of medicine. 
After the war Dr. Lewis, Sr., returned to New England, and 
the quandam drummer-boy was sent back to school. He entered, 
later on, the Adams Academy, at Quincy, Mass., and there received 
a classical education. In 1875 he matriculated in the medical 
department of Harvard University. 
