University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine - Scope Yearbook (Philadelphia, PA)

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I 1 i l l 1 l l A A l i 1 l I the MacPherson Blues as surgeon on their Western Military expedition. In spite of profound learning, extensive travel, military service, excellent social and professional position, he was remarkably shy and retiring, hesitating to express his views authoratively and leaving little behind him commensurate with his learning and experience. He was the first in America, however, deliberately to induce labor for a contracted pelvis at the conclusion of the seventh month with success for both mother and child. This was in 1810. Eight years previously he had established a practical school for obstetrics in the wards of the Philadelphia Almshouseg sections of three students attending each delivery. In 1827 he argued in favor of abdominal pregnancies always being secondary. He had considerable literary ability, but was so diffident that what he wrote was published anony- mously. He thus contributed a number of poems to contemporary magazines. He was a man of profound religious conviction. He mastered a number of foreign languages so that he might study his Bible in Hebrew, Greek, Latin, French and German. His chief literary work in medicine was his adaptation of Burn's book on Obstetrics for the use of American medical students. He died in 1835. The associate and successor of James in the Chair of Obstetrics was one of the most remarkable Egures in American medical history. William Potts Dewees was born May 5, 1768, of Swedish ancestry on his father's side, of English on his mother's, who was the daughter of Thomas Potts, of Pottstown, where Dewees was born. He began the practice of medicine after attending only part of a course of lectures, without acquiring a degree, at first settling in Abington, a few miles outside of Philadelphia. He came to the city directly after the yellow fever epidemic in 1793, and without infiuence, self-educated, without any of the advan- tages which his predecessors had enjoyed, but by the force of his genius and mental power, he immediately achieved an astounding success. He received his honorary medical degree years after he had been in practice. He had instructed himself in French and Latin and was mainly infiuential i11 introducing Baudelocque's work to American students. At the age of forty-four he retired from practice to conduct a farm in the country, in which enterprise, like so many physicians in business, he lost his whole fortune. He returned to Philadelphia five years after he had left the city, poor and with a large fainily dependent upon him. He immediately resumed the successful practice he had leftufive years before. His literary fecundity was amazing. The numerous editions of his works on obstetrics, diseases of women, practice of medicine and diseases of children were the authoritative books on those subjects in America. The dedication of Hodge's Obstetrics to him and to James expressed the feeling of the profession-- To the Memory of Thomas C. james, the first pro- fessor of obstetrics in the University of Pennsylvania, and of William Potts Dewees, his colleague and successor, by whose talents and attainments, moral excellencies, social influences, public teachings and classical writings, the foundation of the science of obstetrics, was made in America. 203

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V FRQF. R. A. F. PENROSE, NLD., LL.D 205