Dudley Peter Allen / by George W. Crile.

  • George Washington Crile
Date:
[1925]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Dudley Peter Allen / by George W. Crile. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    COLLECTK Reprint from SURGERY, GYNECOLOGY AND OBSTETRICS May, 1925, pages 718-720 DUDLEY PETER ALLEN By GEORGE W. CRILE, M.D., F.A.C.S., Cleveland, Ohio Men who achieve distinction achieve it along widely diverse paths. Some as a result of a single stroke of genius scale the heights of fame. Others as the result of long years of effort along one or a few closely related lines, make discoveries of great significance in their chosen fields. Still others, as the result of unusual versatility are able to place the impress of their personalities upon diverse fields achieving distinction in each. In this last group should be placed Dudley Peter Allen, who was at once a surgeon whose abilities as such brought to him the recognition of his fellows as expressed in his election as president of the Ohio State Medical Association and of the American Surgical Association and his appointment as an honorary fellow of the Philadelphia Academy of Surgery and of the American College of Surgeons; a connoisseur of the arts, whose unusual knowledge of the graphic arts in par¬ ticular has been memorialized in the Cleveland Museum of Art and in the beautiful Museum in Oberlin which bears his name; a literateur with a special¬ ized knowledge of the literature pertaining to his chosen profession, a knowledge which found its chief expression in the Cleveland Medical Library and will be memorialized by the new building which is to bear his name; and an organizer, as evidenced repeatedly throughout the long period of his connection with the Medical School of Western Reserve University and with Lakeside Hospital. Dudley Peter Allen was born in Kinsman, at the original family homestead in the Western Reserve, on March 25, 1852, but his youth was spent in the town of Oberlin, where he passed through Oberlin College in his preparation for the profession, which we may assume was chosen more or less as a matter of course because of the family background. We are told by those who knew him well that in his undergraduate days he was not especially studious and showed no par¬ ticular interest in his work except for a love of literature engendered by seasons of ill health. At Harvard, however, the importance of application and of studi¬ ousness appeared first to be awakened in him and he soon became a man of mark among his classmates. Even during his student days, the versatility which was his outstanding characteristic was evidenced and while pursuing his medical studies he was already making a special study of the history of art and beginning a collection of etchings and engravings. I Published by Surgical Pub. Co., Chicago, U.S.A.