Personal reminiscences of Dr. Meltzer. 



By GRAHAM LUSK. 



A friendly personality so long a constant attendant at every 

 important meeting of this Academy of Medicine has passed from 

 us in the fulness of years and in the honored esteem of his fellow- 

 men. Meltzer was born in Russia, educated in Konigsberg, and 

 then studied philosophy and medicine in Berlin between 1875 and 

 1882. In 1883 he came to New York and began the practice of 

 medicine. He was deeply imbued with the scientific spirit of 

 modern German medicine and was also a highly skilled prac- 

 titioner. 



At one of the clinics in Berlin, so he once told me, a patient 

 was brought into the amphitheater and he, a student sitting in 

 the top row of the circle of seats, was asked to make the diagnosis, 

 to which he quickly replied that the trouble was cancer. "Nein,'' 

 replied the professor. The question was put to several others who 

 gave other interpretations and finally again to Meltzer who re- 

 plied, "I told you, Herr Professor, the patient has cancer." A 

 vigorous "Nein" was the rejoiner, the patient was passed from 

 the room and the professor said, "Herr Meltzer, the patient has 

 carcinoma ventricularis, but never allow yourself to tell anyone 

 that he has a fatal disease." This, Meltzer said, he had carried 

 with him as a lesson all his life. 



Meltzer was not content to cultivate a lucrative practice at 

 the expense of the extinction of his extraordinary, inquisitive 

 mind. So one finds him taking holidays in the laboratories of 

 his friends in Europe and, when at home in New York, he would go 

 to the physiological laboratory of the P. and S., tie his horse to 

 a lamp-post, and with his coachman as assistant, perform some 

 physiological experiment for the comfort of his conscience and the 

 instruction of his mind. 



I well remember a dinner of the Association of American 

 Physicians, held in the spring of 1897, an affair then always 

 participated in by a few physiologists, at which I sat between 



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