Astley Paston Cooper Ashhurst / Walter Estell Lee and William Darrach.

  • Lee, Walter Estell.
Date:
[1936]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Astley Paston Cooper Ashhurst / Walter Estell Lee and William Darrach. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    Reprint from SURGERY, GYNECOLOGY AND OBSTETRICS March, 1936, Vol. 62, 645-64S ASTLEY PASTON COOPER ASHHURST WALTER ESTELL LEE, M.D., F.A.C.S., Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and WILLIAM DARRACH, M.D., F.A.C.S., New York, New York From Colonial days Philadelphia has contributed more than its share to the progress of medicine. Soon after the middle of the eighteenth century a group of young Americans returned from Edinburgh imbued with the spirit of that school. It was not long before Morgan and Shippen started the first medical school in Philadelphia, and were soon joined by Kuhn and Rush. Since that time there has been a steady stream of men whose writings and teachings have spread throughout the land the results of their own searchings after truth. Bond and Barton, Wistar and Physick, the Hares and Woods, the Hodges and Penroses, Agnew and Leidy, the Peppers and Ashhursts. Astley Ashhurst early appreciated the responsibilities he had inherited from his father, John Ashhurst, Jr., professor of surgery at the school Morgan had started. His devotion to this profession and its ideals was the dominating influ¬ ence in his whole life. Except for his war service, his entire career was spent in Philadelphia. He was born there August 21, 1876, his mother being Sarah Stokes Wayne Ashhurst. He prepared at the Forsyth School, now the Episcopal Academy, a private college preparatory school located in Philadelphia, and entered the University of Pennsylvania from there, receiving his degree of Bach¬ elor of Arts in 1896 and his Doctor of Medicine in 1900. His classmates always remembered him as taking prizes in Latin and Greek and in taking senior honors in the Academic Department, and he was elected to membership in the Philo- mathean Society, the Phi Beta Kappa and the Sigma Xi fraternities, and gradu¬ ated the first man in the senior class of the medical school. After leaving the medical school he served an interneship from 1900 to 1901 at the Children’s Hospital, and from 1901 to 1904 at the Episcopal Hospital. Following his interneships he served an apprenticeship in the dispensaries of the Episcopal, Orthopedic, Children’s, German (now Lankenau), and the Penn¬ sylvania Hospitals until 1913, when he was elected surgeon to the Orthopedic Department and associate surgeon to the Surgical Department of the Episcopal Hospital. In 1914 he was appointed surgeon to the Orthopedic Hospital and in 1915 he was promoted to the position of surgeon at the Episcopal Hospital. His training as prosector to Dr. G. G. Davis, professor of applied anatomy at the Medical School of the University of Pennsylvania, gave him a knowledge of