Samuel David Gross / [J. Chalmers Da Costa].

  • John Chalmers DaCosta
Date:
[1922]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Samuel David Gross / [J. Chalmers Da Costa]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    SURGERY, GYNECOLOGY AND OBSTETRICS cine, entering the Jefferson Medical College of Philadelphia, and being an office student of the celebrated Dr. George McClellan. On his graduation he started practice in Philadelphia and eked out a live¬ lihood by hack literary work and translations. He spoke German and he acquired a knowledge of French in the course of a few months in order to translate Alphonse Tavernier’s Elements of Operative Surgery, in 1829. He translated the Manual of General Anatomy, by Bayle and Hollard, in 1828, and Jules Hatin’s Obstetrics in the same year. In 1829 he translated Johann Valentin von Hildenbrand’s Treatise on the Nature, Cause, and Treatment of Contagious Typhus. Tavernier’s was the first treatise on operative surgery published in America and attained great success. In 1830, two and a half years after his graduation, he wrote a work on Diseases and Injuries of the Bones and Joints, and although the book became popular, the liberal publishers never paid him a cent. Want of practice in Philadelphia obliged him to move back to Easton. After remaining there for a time, he went to Cincinnati and from there to Louisville, where his fame was made. In 1839 he published his great treatise on Pathological Anatomy, the first in the English language. He received not a single cent for the first edition. The work was a great success and made him broadly known in this country and in Europe. The book was a popular textbook for more than a quarter of a century. In 1851 he published a treatise on Diseases of the Urinary Organs. Up to this time there had been no satisfactory treatise in the English language, the only two existing being Brodie’s Lectures on the Diseases of the Urinary Organs and William Coulson On Diseases of the Bladder and Prostate Gland, both pub¬ lished in 1842. This book, edited by the younger Gross, was still a popular textbook at the end of the 8o’s in the last century. In 1854 he published his noted treatise on Foreign Bodies in the Air Pass¬ ages. This was the very first attempt that had been made to present the subject in systematized form. In 1859 he issued the first edition of his magnificent textbook on surgery; the greatest of his day, the first from America and probably the greatest ever written by one man. Recall the comprehensive nature of the title: A System of Surgery, Pathological, Diagnostic, Therapeutic, and Operative. The sixth edition was issued in 1882. In the beginning of the Civil War, he wrote a Manual of Military Surgery. In 1861, he edited the Lives of Eminent American Physicians and Surgeons of the Nineteenth Century, writing several of the biographies himself. At times he edited medical journals. He contributed a multitude of articles to medical