Pioneer Surgery in Kentucky: A Sketch

by David Wendel Yandell

1806. The earliest original surgical work of any magnitude done in Kentucky, by one of her own sons, was an amputation at the hip-joint. It proved to be the first operation of the kind in the United States. The undertaking was made necessary because of extensive fracture of the thigh with great laceration of the soft parts. The subject was a mulatto boy, seventeen years of age, a slave of the monks of St. Joseph's College. The time was August, 1806; the place, Bardstown; the surgeon, Dr. Walter Brashear; the assistants, Dr. Burr Harrison and Dr. John Goodtell; the result, a complete success. The operator divided his work into two stages. The first consisted in amputating the thigh through its middle third in the usual way, and in tying all bleeding vessels. The second consisted of a long incision on the outside of the limb, exposing the remainder of the bone, which, being freed from its muscular attachments, was then disarticulated at its socket.

Far-seeing as the eye of the frontiersman was, he could not have discerned that the procedure by which he executed the most formidable operation in surgery came so near perfection that it would successfully challenge improvement for more than fourscore years.

Hundreds of hips have since been amputated after some forty different methods; but that which he introduced has passed into general use, and (though now known under the name of Furneaux Jordan's) remains the simplest, the least dangerous, the best.

The first genuine hip-joint amputation executed on living parts was done by Kerr, of Northampton, England, 1774. The first done for shot wounds was by Larrey, in 1793. I feel safe in saying that Brashear had no knowledge of either of these operations. He therefore set about his work without help from precedent, placing his trust in himself, in the clearness of his own head, in the skill of his own hands, in the courage of his own heart. The result shows that he had not overestimated what was in him. But whether or not Brashear had ever heard or read a description of what had been accomplished in this direction by surgeons elsewhere, the young Kentuckian was the first to amputate at the hip-joint in America, and the first to do the real thing successfully in the world.

Dr. Brashear seems to have set no high estimate on his achievement, and never published an account of the case. Had he done so, the art of surgery would thereby have been much advanced, his own fame have been made one of the precious heritages of his country, and, what is better, many valuable lives would have been saved.

Eighteen years after the Jesuits' slave had survived the loss of his limb, the report of the much-eulogized case of Dr. Mott appeared.

Dr. Brashear came of an old and wealthy Catholic family of Maryland. He was born in February, 1776. His father journeyed to Kentucky eight years later, and cleared a farm near Shepherdsville, in Bullitt County. Walter was his seventh son, and was therefore set apart for the medical profession.

When a youth he was enrolled in the literary department of Transylvania University, where it is said he ranked high as a scholar in Latin. At the age of twenty he began the study of medicine, in Lexington, with Dr. Frederick Ridgely, a very cultivated physician and popular man, who had won distinction in the medical staff of the Continental Army. After two years spent in this way, he rode on horseback to Philadelphia, and attended upon a course of lectures in the University of Pennsylvania. At this time Rush, Barton, and Physick were teachers in that venerable seat of learning. His was a restless nature, and after a year spent in Philadelphia he shipped to China as surgeon of a vessel. While among the Celestials he amputated a woman's breast, probably the first exploit of the kind by one from the antipodes. Unfortunately for science, he there learned the method used by the Chinese for clarifying ginseng, and thinking, on his return home, that he saw in this an easy way to wealth, he abandoned the profession in which he had exhibited such originality, judgment, and skill, and engaged in merchandising. Twelve years of commerce and its hazards left him a bankrupt in fortune, but brought him back to the calling in which he was so well fitted to shine. He moved, in 1813, from Bardstown to Lexington, where he at once secured a large practice, especially in diseases of the bones and joints. He was thought to excel in the treatment of fractures of the skull, for the better management of which a trephine was made in Philadelphia, under his direction, which, in his judgment, was superior to any then in use.

The same temper which led him to leave Philadelphia without his medical degree, sail to China, and afterward enter commerce, again asserted itself, and he forsook for the second time his vocation. With his family he now moved to St. Mary's Parish, Louisiana, and engaged in sugar-planting. During his residence in the South he served his adopted State in the Senate of the United States. He employed much time in the study of the flora of the West. "During the winter of 1843-4, when Henry Clay was on a visit to New Orleans" (says a writer in the New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal), "we had the pleasure, together with some twenty-five physicians, of spending the evening with him at the house of a medical friend. While at the table one of the company proposed the health of the venerable Dr. Brashear, 'the first and only surgeon in Louisiana who had successfully performed amputation at the hip-joint.' Mr. Clay, who sat next to Dr. Brashear, with characteristic good humor, immediately observed, 'He has you on the hip, Doctor,' to the great amusement of Brashear and the rest of the company."

Dr. Brashear was a man of fine literary taste and many and varied accomplishments. In conversation he was always entertaining, often brilliant. His voice was pleasant, his manners affable. In stature he was short; in movement, quick and nervous. But in the make-up of the man one essential of true greatness—fixedness of purpose—had been omitted. He lacked the staying qualities. He was "variable and fond of change." "His full nature, like that river of which Alexander broke the strength, spent itself in channels which led to no great name on earth." By a single exploit, at the age of thirty, he carved his name at high-water mark among the elect in surgery. Most of his life thereafter he wasted in desultory labors. As the learned Grotius said of his own life, he consumed it in levities and strenuous inanities.