David Williams Cheever / by David Cheever.

  • Cheever, David
Date:
[1928]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: David Williams Cheever / by David Cheever. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    By DAVID CHEEVER, M.D., F.A.C.S., Boston I AM glad to have the opportunity of presenting a biographical sketch of one of New England’s great surgeons. When I first went to Boston as a young man in surgery, I had the pleasure of attending Dr. Cheever’s lectures and clinics, where I learned lessons of enduring value. Dr. Cheever was a quiet, modest man, at once a brilliant operator and a precise, sound, and conscientious surgeon. He made notable contributions to science which surgeons of this generation do well to study. His lectures, which have been reprinted, are as readable and as much to the point today as when they were first issued in 1894. They present in graphic language a sequence of events in pathological conditions that give insight not only into the character of disease and its effect on the patient, but also its relation to surgical conditions in general. W. J. Mayo. THE Harvard Medical School, and the science and art of surgery in New England were widely influenced during the last third of the nineteenth century by David Williams Cheever. He was of Puritan stock, descended through a line of ministers, teachers, and doctors from Ezekiel Cheever who came from Canterbury, England in 1637, taught school for 70 years in Boston and vicinity and became one of the earliest and the most famous of the masters of the Public Latin School. Four of these ancestors were graduates of Harvard College and two were physicians—his grandfather Abijah Cheever of Boston, a surgeon in the Revolutionary War, and his father Charles Augustus Cheever, who in a small New England town practiced medicine and surgery, attracted students and with them dissected cadavers in his attic, prepared skeletons and wax injections, and did novel operations after reading descriptions in the scanty literature of the period and practicing on what material he could obtain. The son was born in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, November 30, 1831. His life was that of the average New England boy. He remembered helping his father in surgical emergencies before the days of anaesthesia. He graduated from Harvard College in 1852, still uncertain as to his career, since his father opposed medicine and he himself leaned toward a literary calling. In this doubt an opportunity to study and travel on the Continent presented itself, and association with American medical students in their hospital visits brought the realization
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