the Legislature and also to the State Senate, where he took a prominent part in favor of educational projects. He was one of the originators and first President of the State Historical Society. (b. May 18, 1801; d. March 12, 1856.) Dr. John B. Donsman, a native of Michigan, commenced practice in 1826 with his preceptor Dr. Twitchell, of New Hampshire. In 1840 he came to Wisconsin, and settled in Milwaukee, where he practised with success up to the time of his death. He was a man of clear perceptions, great stability of character, and devotion to his profession. He was a member of the State Medical Society and of the American Medical Association. (b. 1807; d. 1868.) Dr. Clark G. Pease, a native of New Hampshire, commenced practice in Holyoke, Mass., in 1849, but in 1850 removed to Janesville, Wisconsin. His agreeable address and skill as a physician soon won him a numerous class of patrons. He was an influential member of, and one of the best workers in, the State Medical Association, acted on nearly every committee of importance, and was elected President in 1857. He contributed papers to the State Society, and also to the American Medical Association. He served as a surgeon in the late war, and lost his life from a dissection wound. (b. Dec. 31, 1821; d. June 27, 1864.) Dr. Alexander McDill, a native of Pennsylvania, after practising for fifteen years in his native State, removed in 1856 to Wisconsin, and settled in Plover, Portage Co., where he became fully employed. In 1862-3 he was sent to the Legislature, and the following year to the Senate. In 1868 he was chosen Superintendent of the State Hospital for the Insane. In 1872 he was elected to Congress, but at the expiration of his term of office, resumed his place as Superintendent of the Asylum. (d. Nov. 12, 1875.) In addition to the foregoing, I will name Drs. Henry M. Lilly, Moses Barrett, H. O. Crone, A. Blanchard, B. F. White, and Corydon Farr.

My task here ends. A century of American Medical Biography has been traversed. Of necessity, the memoirs are very brief. The claims of every part of our country have however been considered. The retrospect is finished: I would it were worthier of the occasion. And in conclusion I wish to bear testimony to the fact that the study of the lives of the physicians of America, for the Centennial period, has produced in me, as I trust it will in others, a profound conviction that eminence and honorable distinction in the profession, are the legitimate results of good education and professional knowledge, conjoined with high moral character and devotion to duty. These qualities, with a desire to do good and an active sympathy for our race, stand out so prominently in the lives of all truly eminent physicians, as to appear to be essential traits of professional character. So uniformly are love of man and devotion to duty characteristic of the true physician, that it is not arrogant to claim for him a higher approbation, as in the vision of Abou Ben Adhem, who saw that the name of him who loved his fellow men "led all the rest," on the roll "of those whom love of God had blest."

When in the course of time another century of American Independence shall have been concluded, the professional men then occupying our places may perchance choose to meet as we have done, and, casting a retrospective glance across the second century, contrast their position and the progress then attained with that which marks our era. And while I trust that they may have abundant reason to congratulate themselves upon the advance which medicine shall have made, I doubt not they will have an honest pride in the monuments, legacies, and records left by

the profession during the century just closed. These have in part been referred to in the addresses and papers read before this Congress. Permit me to indulge the hope that the biographer of the next Centennial may have as great pleasure and satisfaction in the study of the lives of the medical men of the second century of our country, as I have enjoyed in the preparation of this address. I am persuaded that the temple of fame holds no more honored tablets than those on which are inscribed the names and deeds of the worthy members of the Medical Profession. That the members of this Congress may deserve to have their names perpetuated to fame through all succeeding ages, is my earnest prayer. To have my own there enrolled, I may not hope, since this is granted to but the immortal few.

ADDRESS ON OBSTETRICS.

BY

THEOPHILUS PARVIN, M.D.,

PROFESSOR OF OBSTETRICS AND THE MEDICAL AND SURGICAL DISEASES OF WOMEN, COLLEGE OF PHYSICIANS AND SURGEONS OF INDIANA.

"There is no department of medicine or surgery, superior to midwifery in dignity and utility."-Mauriceau.

OF American Obstetrics, with its associate branches, Gynecology and Pædiatrics, we commemorate the centennial.

What have Americans done, in the century just closed, to advance these great departments of Medicine? How easy the question and how difficult the answer! Contemporaneous discoveries and successes are found in these as well as in other fields of human effort, and who, then, shall be primus inter pares! Sometimes, too, that which is supposed to be new is really old, and the discoverer has unconsciously trodden in the footsteps of another.

Beside this, much of medical knowledge is merely provisional, the best expression of the truth for the time being, and serves only a present utility-a mere ladder by which we ascend to higher platforms and larger planes, and which is then cast aside. Nor does everything claimed as valuable by him who first points it out, prove to be such when thoroughly tested. Alas, for the many Ixions who mistake a cloud for a goddess! Alas, for the fool's gold that so often delights, so surely disappoints! Change is not synonymous with improvement; so far from change always being progress, it may be retrogression.2

Nor are these the only difficulties. Add to them the limitation of individual knowledge, and the infirmities of human judgment, so liable to error in estimating the value of things present, no matter how determined and desirous one may be suum cuique tribuere. And surmounting all these, there stands in bold relief the fact that the very work of this occasion has been largely anticipated by an able paper in the American Journal of the Medical Sciences,3 from the pen of one who has himself contributed so much to the glory of American Medicine. Confronted by such difficulties, and addressing such auditors, one even of ample qualifications might well shrink from attempting the duty assigned me.

However, strengthened by your recognition of these impediments, and

Professor Blackie, Hora Hellenica, observes: "Even in the free exercise of poetical talent in the case of individual poets of highly potentiated imagination, we constantly stumble on comparisons which have been made independently by other poets at other times or in distant countries, and which superficial critics are sometimes eager to fasten on as plagiarism." Quite similar facts are observed in the history of medicine.

2 Baudelocque, Vol. II, pp. 34, of L'Art des Accouchemens, Paris, 1781, in referring to the obstetrical forceps remarks: car si plusieurs ont travaillé à sa perfection.

les autres ne l'on rendu que plus. imparfait."

July, 1876. A Century of American Medicine. III-Obstetrics and Gynecology. By T. Gaillard Thomas, M.D.

confiding in your earnest sympathies with this work, I address myself to it with zealous desire to honor justly both the dead and the living of our country, who have added useful knowledge in obstetrics, and in diseases of women or of children, and to help exalt their fame in all they have thus done to lift or lighten the cross of human suffering.

In this proposed exposition, the subject of Obstetrics will, for obvious reasons, be presented first. After some brief allusions to the condition of obstetric art and science in the last century, and the sources from which the first American practitioners of this art derived their knowledge, suitable topics will be found in works on Obstetrics, and in special contributions to obstetric pathology and therapeutics.

The eighteenth century was marked by great advances in obstetric knowledge and improvements in practice, though history has shown the mistake of a distinguished physician of South Carolina, Dr. David Ramsey, who, in an address before the Medical Society of his State, on the first day of the present century, asserted "that the art of obstetrics had been brought to such perfection, further improvements were scarcely to be expected."

Standing at the commencement of the eighteenth century is the famous Hollander, Deventer, who declared theory as essential to practice as body to shadow-surely a very doubtful compliment to practice-who asserted that those1 ignorant of the obliquities of the uterus were equally blind with him that saw trees as men walking, but who, despite these and similar exaggerations, despite plain, palpable errors, advocated cephalic version, and taught the genu-pectoral position as part of the treatment in one variety of prolapse of the cord, and in some cases of transverse3 presen

tation.

Near its close we have the illustrious Baudelocque, to whom so many of our obstetric authors acknowledge their obligations, and whose fame, notwithstanding his twenty-three presentations and ninety-four positions, has suffered only partial eclipse in the revolutions of more than fourscore years. And interposed we have Chapman coming from the country to London once a year to give lectures on obstetrics, the first, and the first ever given in that city, being in 1730, and revealing the beneficent instrument which the Chamberlens had kept secret with cruel cupidity, the obstetric forceps; we have Sir Fielding Oulde, the wit's "Lord deliver

quicunque obliqui situs uteri sunt ignari, in artibus obstetricantium æque cecutiant, ac ille, qui homines instar arborum videbat ambulantes. Henrici à Deventer, Medicine Doctoris, Operationes Chirurgica Novum Lumen exhibentes Obstetricantibus, etc., Leyden, 1701.

Similiter accidit sed rarius, ut funiculus à capite retrorsum vertebris vel ossi sacro apprimatur: tunc caput alterutra manu removendum, prout scilicet plus minus in alterutrum latus vergit; parturienti (si vires suppetant) in genua provolutæ à tergo manum sospitam admoveat obstetrix: aut, si infirmior fuerit, in alterutrum latus declinetur, uno pede ad ventrem attracto, ut plus spatii suppetat, etc., Ibid., cap. xxxviii. De partu difficili, ab infante prævia vena umbilicali prodeunte.

3

ideoque parturientem, tali situ disponat, quo uteri spatium suppetat, nec ille cum infante in manum obstetricis delabatur; nimirum utero propendulo convenit parturientem procumbere genibus, aut in dextrum latus inclinare, posteriore corpore aliquatenus elevato, et ut plurimum prono, etc., Ibid., cap. xl. De infantibus transversim positis.

My authority is Dr. Thyme. Vide MSS. Lectures, 1794, Surgeon-General's Library, Washington. Dr. T. remarks, “Chapman had no machines, nor were his students allowed to attend midwifery cases. To Smellie we owe those improvements." Denman, however, credits Dr. Maubray, 1724, with the first lectures.

us," giving a glimpse at the mechanism of labor, that mechanism soon to be much more fully and clearly expounded by Smellie and Solayres; we have Smellie and William Hunter, representing opposite but concordant elements of obstetrics, mechanism and physiology, the one writing a work upon obstetrics, the fruit of forty years' study, which for nearly threequarters of a century was the best English text-book, and enduring the harmless criticism of Dr. Burton, who probably had his reward in being made the Dr. Slop of Tristram Shandy; the other preparing those plates of the human gravid uterus, which can never become obsolete; we have Levret, the geometric obstetrician, explaining the mechanism of labor before the Paris Academy of Surgery, using in his demonstrations the egg of an ostrich and a "mattrice mechanique," and dividing with Smellie' the honor of an important improvement in the forceps. With these two men, using the words of Baudelocque, commenced the most brilliant epoch of obstetric art.

But it is not my purpose to mention further the famous obstetricians of the eighteenth century, and allude to any of their special contributions. Enough to add that the two first American obstetric practitioners had been instructed by two of the most eminent of London teachers, for Lloyd, in Boston, and Shippen,3 in Philadelphia, were pupils of Smellie and Wm. Hunter. Thus we see that the germ of American Obstetrics was British rather than French, in so far giving probable contradiction to the assertion of Dr. Tyler Smith when he states, "notwithstanding the blood relation between the United States and this country, American Midwifery is far more the child of France than of England." So, too, probable contradiction is given by these other facts, that Dr. Samuel Bard, the author of the first American work on obstetrics, had received his professional training largely in Edinburgh; and that there, too, after having previously been a house-pupil in London under Drs. Osborne and John Clarke, was instructed Dr. T. C. James, the first professor of obstetrics in the University of Pennsylvania. And the famous Dewees, who bears the same paternal relation to American Obstetrics that Physick does to American Surgery, or Rush to American Practice, and who "has the high honor of first attempting a full course of lectures on obstetrics in America," was too independent a thinker and original investigator to be unduly swayed by the teachings of any man or of any school. And finally, the obstetric books of the American profession have been British or American much more than French.

Seventy or eighty years ago, the practice of obstetrics was almost exclusively in the hands of women, even in the long settled parts of the United States, and, as the tide of population passed westward, the female midwife was still the trust of the matrons among the early settlers who

1 Possibly, according to the recent researches of Dr. McClintock, each of them was anticipated by Dr. Pugh (see Dublin Journal, June, 1876), so that there is an end to the contest in this matter between France and England.

2 Dr. Bartlett, of Massachusetts, states that Dr. James Lloyd, of Boston, was the first systematic practitioner of midwifery in that section of the country, 1754.

3 In 1756 Dr. William Shippen engaged in the same practice at Philadelphia, and subsequently was Professor of Anatomy, Surgery, and Midwifery in the University of Pennsylvania.

4 Eulogium upon William P. Dewees, by Prof. Hugh L. Hodge. These lectures were first delivered in 1797.

Drs. James and Dewees should be regarded as the fathers of obstetric science in America: the former, erudite and polished, gave currency to the teachings of the British schools; the latter, more vigorous and energetic, exemplifying theoretically and practically the doctrines of the French obstetricians."-Preface to Hodge's Obstetrics.