Joseph Pancoast / [W.S. Miller].

  • William Snow Miller
Date:
1930
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Joseph Pancoast / [W.S. Miller]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    2 SURGERY, GYNECOLOGY AND OBSTETRICS which he added numerous notes, chiefly histological. This he still further re¬ modeled in 1842 and again in 1846. For years this was the text used by the students at the Jefferson Medical College until it was supplanted by the excellent manual of Erasmus Wilson which eventually gave way to the familiar “Gray.” In 1844 he published his Treatise on Operative Surgery, which passed through three editions; the third appearing in 1852. He contributed numerous articles to the American Journal of the Medical Sciences, American Medical Intelligence, Medical Examiner, besides publishing many papers on surgical and pathological subjects, introductory lectures, and, in 1856, his well known Professional Glimpses Abroad. In 1841 Pan coast was transferred from the chair of surgery to that of anatomy which he resigned in 1874, after having filled for 36 years two of the most im¬ portant chairs in the Jefferson Medical School: surgery and anatomy. In 1854 he was elected to the medical staff of the Pennsylvania Hospital and resigned in 1864. He was a member of his state, county, and city medical societies; the American Medical Association, Academy of Natural Sciences, College of Phy¬ sicians of Philadelphia, and of the American Philosophical Society. Surgery is indebted to Pancoast for a number of new operations. He devised the plow and groove, or plastic suture, by means of which four raw surfaces, the bevelled edges of the flap, and the margins of the groove cut by the side of the nose, to receive the flaps, come together. He used this suture in all his rhinoplastic operations with uniform success. He devised a fine needle, turned near the point into a hook, which he introduced just behind the cornea, through the anterior part of the vitreous humor, between the margin of the dilated iris and the lens. By means of this needle he was able to cut deeply the soft parts of the lens and withdraw along the line of entrance of the needle any hardened nucleus leaving the piece in the outer border of the vitreous humor. The operation was usually followed with little irritation. For occlusion of the nasal duct in ordinary cases of epiphora he devised a small hollow ivory tube, from which the earthy matter had been removed, which he introduced from in front by a puncture of the lachrymal duct and left it to be slowly dissolved. In bad cases of internal strabismus he found that the tendon of the internal oblique muscle was often encircled by rigid connective tissue, and it was only by drawing the tendon out by means of a blunt hook and dividing the tendon that the strabismus could be corrected. In the case of large abscesses lying between the colon and caecum and in front of the quadratus lumborum muscle, he performed successfully a lumbar operation. By cutting the posterior muscles of the velum palate and dividing any attachment they might have made to the pharynx, he several times restored a voice that had previously been unintelligible. In empyema he raised a semicircular flap over the ribs, and, puncturing the pleura near the base of the flap, introduced a short catheter down to the inner
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