Elias Samuel Cooper / [Emmet Lane Rixford].

  • Rixford, Emmet Lane, 1904-
Date:
[1929]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Elias Samuel Cooper / [Emmet Lane Rixford]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    iv/uODIi COLLECT/ON, Reprint from SURGERY, GYNECOLOGY AND OBSTETRICS December, ig2g, pages 862-865 ELIAS SAMUEL COOPER / ^ EMMET RIXFORD, M.D., F.A.C.S., San Francisco, California Elias SAMUEL cooper was emphatically a surgeon. In fact he was known to have somewhat bombastically stated that surgery was the only career worthy of a man. Daring as a surgeon, as a man a fighter, a demon for work, endowed with great originality, he was little short of a surgical genius. He is generally credited with having been the first, west of Pennsylvania, to have used chloroform as an anaesthetic and was further distinguished by having founded the first medical college on the Pacific Coast. He was a brother of Dr. Esaias Cooper, of Galesburg, Illinois, and of Jacob Cooper, professor of Greek and later of philosophy in Rutger’s College, New Jersey. Born in Somerville, Ohio, in 1822, he began the study of medicine in Cin¬ cinnati at the age of 16 years, and was graduated from the St. Louis University 2 years later. He began practice in Danville, Ohio, but in 1844 moved to Peoria, Illinois, where he built the first hospital in that city which he called his ^‘Eye and Ear Infirmary and Orthopedic Hospital,” a three story building on what was at that time called the prairie about one mile from the edge of town and was called by the children “The Spook House.” His office was in the center of town in one of the very few brick buildings. On the second floor he established an anatomical museum and dissecting room, where he labored far into the night to perfect himself in the anatomy of his operative fields. Doubtless the cadavers were surreptitiously obtained, there being no anatomical law at that date. Some supersensitive citizens resented the row of human skeletons which lined the wall and when the County authorities publicly turned over to Dr. Cooper for dissec¬ tion, the bodies of two murderers—victims of the first execution in Knox County —a mass meeting of irate citizens was held in protest, but the meeting broke up in an uproar and the matter was quashed. Dr. Cooper, however, found it con¬ venient to arrange for his future dissections at his hospital, which was just out of town. His life in Illinois was strenuous, to say the least, and the minutes of the Peoria Medical Association have many allusions to Dr. Cooper. On one occasion, in 1850, he was “profoundly reprimanded and requested to resign” because of unethical conduct in advertising his Infirmary. Notwithstanding this criticism, in 1851, he was delegate (alternate) to the American Medical Association. In Copyright, 1929, by Surgical Pub. Co. of Chicago y