Samuel David Gross / [J. Chalmers Da Costa].

  • Da Costa, J. Chalmers (John Chalmers), 1863-1933.
Date:
[1922]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Samuel David Gross / [J. Chalmers Da Costa]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    Reprint from SURGERY, GYNECOLOGY AND OBSTETRICS July, IQ22, pages 115-118 °i 1 ROY MOODIE COLLECTION. SAMUEL DAVID GROSS SAMUEL DAVID GROSS, the elder Gross, as we all called him in order to distinguish him from his brilliant son and successor, Samuel W. Gross, my old master whom I loved and admired with all the enthusiasm of boyhood more than 30 years ago, was born in Easton, Pennsylvania, in 1805. His great-grandparents came from the Lower or Rhenish Palatinate in one of the emigrations of the Seventeenth Century, from that portion of Germany which, before its devastating wars, had been a veritable garden spot. The soldiers of Louis XIV had interpreted literally the order of the Sun King to Louvois to burn up the country. They killed three-fourths of the people and destroyed four-fifths of the property. In the Palatinate, Wallenstein and Gustavus Adol¬ phus, Tilly and Spinola, Conde and Turenne performed some of their most sanguinary actions. They left the Palatinate a gory wilderness with the black¬ ened ruins of homesteads, buildings, and churches and the land harried by great flocks of ravening wolves. In the veins of Gross ran the blood of the calm, scholarly, patriotic, broad¬ minded, deep-thinking, home-loving, and philanthropic Palatines; of those men who abandoned home and country for the rights of free speech, of liberty, and of conscience. Gross was brought up on a farm. He loved the country all his life and he knew and appreciated its magic. Nature was to him an endless pleasure. Birds, animals, the woods and especially flowers were to him a source of the utmost delight. He loved the sunrise with its glory of color and the sunset with its splendor of flame. He loved the blue depths of the heavens, the sea, the majesty of the storm, the starlight, and the stream. He knew familiarly the flora of this entire region of Pennsylvania. He always kept flowers in his office and about his house, and he insisted on seeing them in hospital wards. Once in a hospital I saw him tenderly lift a flower, sadly comment upon how soon it would fade, saying: “It has but one Spring and we mortals go almost as quickly for we have but a few Springs. ” He had within him something of the Wordsworth feeling: “It is my faith that every flower enjoys the air it breathes.” He was educated in the common schools and started to study medicine under Doctor Swift, of Easton. After he had begun his study in Doctor Swift’s office he made up his mind that he had not sufficient education for the proper study of his profession and he went back to school, finishing in the famous Academy at Lawrenceville, New Jersey. He then renewed the study of medi-