We pass over twenty years or more.
It is operating-day at Bellevue Hospital, in New York city. A very serious and important operation is about to be performed. Three hundred students and physicians are seated in a semicircle under the great dome of the hospital, in profound silence and intense interest, while the professor and attending surgeon is delivering a brief but comprehensive lecture relative to the forthcoming operation.
The speaker is a man of middle age, medium height, deep, expressive eyes, well-developed brow, with that excellent quality of muscle and nerve that is only the result of earlier out-door exercise and development, with calm deportment and modest speech. “His conciseness of expression and quiet self-possession are evident to every beholder, and comprehensive and congenial to every listener.”
Who is this splendid man before whom students and physicians bow in such profound respect and veneration, and to whom even Professors Mott, Parker, Elliott, Clark, etc., give especial attention?
It is Stephen Smith, M. D., once the Onondaga farmer boy!
Says Dr. Francis, of New York, “When a youthful farmer is seen studying the works of learned authors during that portion of the day which is generally set aside for relaxation and pleasing pastime, one may easily predict for him ultimate success in the branch of life that he may choose, provided he follows out the higher instincts of his nature. The same zeal that caused Stephen Smith, farmer, to study at the risk of ease, and meet the fatigue of body with the energies of mind, has ever marked his course in after years.”
Commencing Practice.
From that excellent work, “Scenes in the Practice of a New York Surgeon,” by Dr. E. H. Dixon, I copy, with some abbreviation, the following, which the author terms “Leaves from the Log-book of an Unfledged Æsculapian:”—
“In the year 1830 I was sent forth, like our long-suffering and much-abused prototype,—old father Noah’s crow,—from the ark of safety, the old St. Duane Street College. I pitched my tent, and set up my trap, in what was then a fashionable up-town street.
“I hired a modest house, and had my arm-chair, my midnight couch, and my few books in my melancholy little office, and I confess that I now and then left an amputating-knife, or some other awful-looking instrument, on the table, to impress the poor women who came to me for advice.