LIFE AND WRITINGS OP BECLARD. 13 



he modified to great advantage the method of Celsus in the 

 lateral operation. 



His vast erudition was equally extensive in surgery. In 

 his lectures, delivered at the Hospital of La Piti6, he gave 

 unquestionable proofs of an extensive and solid knowledge. 

 Even those who confined themselves to his course of lectures 

 on surgery, and who disdained to attend his operations, ex- 

 hibited on a very modest theatre, could not, at least, deny him 

 the merit of being extremely well versed in Surgical litera- 

 ture. He was always the general admiration of his audience, 

 in seeing with what extraordinary talent he developed and 

 commented on the theories of those men who have written on 

 this branch of the healing art. It is useless to endeavour to 

 avenge here Beclard for the character with which he was re- 

 proached, of being a surgeon only in theory. Let us not 

 mingle with the pleasure we experience in recording the merit 

 and talents of this excellent man, the bitter remembrance of 

 the numerous persecutions and ridiculous cabals, of which he 

 was the object. The reputation of Beclard, as a professor, 

 was spreading more and more every day. He possessed the 

 very rare faculty of presenting methodically, with precision 

 and simplicity, all that his extraordinary memory had retain- 

 ed. He was particularly happy in the selection of his words 

 and in the construction of his phrases. He preferred preci- 

 sion and vivacity of expression to elegance. His language 

 was parsimonious of metaphors ; but he developed his ideas 

 by a gradation of words admirably chosen, so that the last ex- 



that such great anatomists as Beclard, and a great many other European 

 surgeons, such as Speranza, Lisfranc and others who published, having re- 

 moved the parotid, have been mistaken, and that they have only extracted 

 an enlarged lymphatic gland, is more than we are disposed to assert. That 

 this may have been sometimes the case, I entertain no doubt, for three years 

 ago, Dr. Gibson performed an operation which, as he correctly observed, 

 might have been palmed on a class of students, as being an operation for the 

 removal of the parotid, whilst it was only an enlarged lymphatic r nd. But 

 at the same time, if any reliance is to be placed on the word 01 aJeclard, I 

 think we can not deny him the glory of having performed this difficult 

 operation. TBASS. 



