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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    that only medicine would satisfy him. He returned and plunged into the Harvard Medical School. Let those who insist on prolonged and rigid pre-medical re¬ quirements take note that this man would probably have been lost to medicine if early decision had been necessary! Picture a leading medical school of 1856. Attendance at three courses of lec¬ tures was required-—each course consisting of five lectures a day for 4 months. The clinical work consisted of “walking the wards” of the Massachusetts General Hospital once a week in medicine, and once in surgery, and of attending a day of showy public operations. In the remaining 8 months the student attended extramural lectures or apprenticed himself to a practicing doctor, or loafed or worked at other things. The next year the same course of lectures was repeated, and the next; then a perfunctory examination and a degree. There was no laboratory work except in anatomy and that was not required, but the earnest student could dissect the three parts assigned to him and bargain and dicker for more. Four of the eight professors attracted Cheever: Storer in obstetrics, Clarke in materia medica, Henry J. Bigelow in surgery, but pre¬ eminently Oliver Wendell Holmes in anatomy. To the latter—witty, brilliant, scholarly—he gave allegiance and he dissected and dissected and dissected. Holmes noticed him, to his later advantage, as we shall see. Four opportunities each year for interne service were available—two as medical and two as surgical “house pupils” at the Massachusetts General Hospital. Appointment was not by examination but by solicitation of the trus¬ tees. Was it likely that a country boy without influence or friends would be chosen? Cheever thought not, and his soul rebelled at possible rejection without trial. He apprenticed himself to the physician of the State Almhouse Hospital on an island in Boston Harbor for a year, and a panorama of the needy, desti¬ tute, and criminal sick passed before him, affording a mixture of general medicine, obstetrics, a little surgery, the care of children, contagious diseases, skin diseases, and venereal infections. He compounded medicines, improvised apparatus, and was given a free hand with privilege of reference to his chief when he wished. It was good preparation for general practice. So he hung out his modest shingle in Boston, waited 2 weeks for his first patient, and collected four hundred dollars the first year. He kept the pot boiling by writing essays for the Atlantic Monthly and the North American Review; he accepted the position of physician to the small-pox hospital during an epidemic and conducted it with as little as possible publicity among his patients and friends. And Oliver Wendell Holmes remembered the zealous dissector of the class of 1858, and when the demonstratorship of anatomy became vacant he offered it to him. Thus began 33 years of teaching in the Harvard Medical School. For 8 years he labored hard at the demonstratorship, making all of the lecture dissections for Holmes, revolutionizing the teaching in the dissecting room, and
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