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SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol, XIV. No. 361. 



performing the active duties of his chair. 

 The remaining members of this faculty- 

 made a group of medical teachers who could 

 challenge comparison with any similar 

 group in this country. Of Benjamin Silli- 

 man it is not necessary for me to speak 

 further, as his most important work lay 

 outside of the immediate field of medicine, 

 and will be considered by another speaker. 



Dr. Nathan Smith, when he came to New 

 Haven from Dartmouth, was already a star 

 of the first magnitude in the medical firma- 

 ment. Starting a poor boy in a small 

 village in Vermont, he managed by his own 

 efforts to obtain a good general education 

 and then at the Harvard Medical School 

 and in Great Britain a medical education 

 of a character then almost unknown in 

 New England. He was the originator of 

 the Dartmouth Medical School in 1797, the 

 most distinguished member of the first 

 medical faculty of Yale, and in 1820 the 

 organizer of the Medical Department of 

 Bowdoin College. He did much of his 

 most important work in New Haven, 

 where he remained until his death, in 1829. 



Nathan Smith shed undying glory upon 

 the Yale Medical School. Famous in his 

 day and generation, he is still more famous 

 to-day, for he was far ahead of his times, 

 and his reputation, unlike that of so many 

 medical worthies of the past, has steadily 

 increased as the medical profession has 

 slowly caught up with him. We now see 

 that he did more for the general advance- 

 ment of medical and surgical practice than 

 any of his predecessors or contemporaries 

 in this country. He was a man of high 

 intellectual and moral qualities, of great 

 originality and untiring energy, an accu- 

 rate and keen observer, unfettered by tra- 

 ditions and theories, fearless, and above all 

 blessed with an uncommon fund of plain 

 common sense. 



Nathan Smith's essay on typhus fever, 

 published in 1824, is like a fresh breeze from 



the sea amid the dreary and stifling writings 

 of most of his contemporaries. The disease 

 which he here describes is typhoid fever, 

 and never before had the symptoms been so 

 clearly and accurately pictured. He recog- 

 nized that this fever is due to a specific 

 cause and is self -limited . It took courage 

 in those days for a physician to write, " Dur- 

 ing the whole course of my practice I have 

 never been satisfied that I have cut short a 

 single case of typhus, which I knew to be 

 such," and again, *' It does not follow of 

 course that this disease in all cases requires 

 remedies, or that a patient should necessarily 

 take medicine because he has the disease." 

 To him the lancet was not the ' magnum 

 donum Dei ' that it was to Benjamin Rush, 

 and he did more to do away with its indis- 

 criminate use than any single man. The 

 treatment which he advocated — cold water, 

 milk, and avoidance of all violent remedies 

 — is practically the same as that now em- 

 ployed, but it was many a day before phy- 

 sicians came to accept Dr. Smith's revolu- 

 tionary views. 



To the surgeon Nathan Smith's paper on 

 the pathology and treatment of necrosis has 

 in course of time become as much of a clas- 

 sic as the essay on typhus fever is to the 

 physician. Here we find the same admir- 

 able description of symptoms, and the in- 

 troduction of methods of treatment which 

 anticipated modern surgery. This is not 

 the occasion, even did time permit, to de- 

 scribe Dr. Smith's achievements in surgery. 

 It must suffice to say that he was the first 

 to perform a number of important surgical 

 operations, and that in this branch, not less 

 than in medicine, he was an innovator and 

 reformer. 



Although none of Dr. Smith's colleagues 

 can be placed in the same rank with him 

 as contributors to medical knowledge, they 

 were men of excellent attainments and be- 

 came distinguished teachers. 



Dr. Eli Ives was connected with the 



