Memoir of D. Hayes Agnew, M.D., Ll.D. : prepared at the request of and read before the College of Physicians, Philadelphia, January 4, 1893 / by J. William White.

  • White, J. William (James William), 1850-1916.
Date:
1893
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Memoir of D. Hayes Agnew, M.D., Ll.D. : prepared at the request of and read before the College of Physicians, Philadelphia, January 4, 1893 / by J. William White. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

    19/42 (page 13)
    for many years he was the chief consultant of three States, with a population of millions, his experience, almost without exception, furnished a parallel to the rarest and most obscure conditions. I have more than once begun to describe to him some recent experience or observation of my own, which seemed to me unique, only to have him interrupt me kindly and smilingly and finish the description as accurately as if he had been present and had seen the case himself. Often, too, to my great profit, he would volunteer some words of explanation that instantly made clear all that was previously doubtful. His own powers of observation were so well trained that in many surgical conditions a glance sufficed for a diagnosis, and although usually cautious about expressing an opinion he would sometimes venture upon a positive one the moment he saw the case. This was notably so in patients with complete scrotal hernias or with large hydroceles, the distinction between which he made by the relation of the tumor to the anterior plane of the body; in cases of shoulder injury, where the position of the patient revealed the presence or absence of luxation ; in deep abscesses, where a glance at the overlying skin and a touch with his opposing fingers completed his examination; in fracture near joints and in un-united fracture, where he almost seemed to have a special sense for determining preternatural mobility, and in many other classes of cases. The story which Vidal de Cassis tells of Dupuytren, that within a few days of his death he was asked his opinion of a lesion of the elbow in a patient who was brought to his bedside, and without touching him diagnosed a luxation, which had been denied by an eminent colleague, but was subsequently demonstrated and reduced, might well have been told of Agnew. (3) In speaking of his operative work I have purposely used the word precision to characterize it, instead of the usual eulogistic term— brilliancy. Dr. Agnew himself disliked the latter word, and with it the kind of operating which it often described, in which everything is sacrificed for the sake of what in athletics would be called a “ record.” He has more than once told me interesting anecdotes of the difficulties into which this habit of what he called “ slap-dash ” work had led some of his contemporaries. He agreed with my friend Mr. Treves, him- self an exceptionally able operator, who says that the days of the so called ‘‘brilliant” surgeon are over, and that it is no longer a matter of primary importance that a stone should be extracted or a vessel tied or a limb removed in a limited number of seconds. Dr. Agnew was naturally a quick operator, and his training dated back to the days when pre-anesthetic traditions kept alive the theory that rapid surgery was good surgery, but he was above everything else