George Ryerson Fowler / [Lewis Stephen Pilcher].

  • Pilcher, Lewis Stephen, 1845-1934.
Date:
[1924]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: George Ryerson Fowler / [Lewis Stephen Pilcher]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    1/6
    COLLECTION. Reprint from SURGERY, GYNECOLOGY AND OBSTETRICS April, 1924, pages 564-567 GEORGE RYERSON FOWLER By LEWIS S. PILCHER, M.D., Brooklyn, New York FOR twenty-five years previous to his lamented death in February, 1906, George Ryerson Fowler held the foremost place among the surgeons of Brooklyn, New York. In securing this place he had not been helped by any adventitious circumstance; it was the result of his own energy and capacity. He was born in New York City, December 25, 1848, of parents who for several generations had transmitted the best traits of an English Colonial strain. Later his father, having been made the master mechanic in charge of the repair shops of the Long Island Railroad, removed to Jamaica, Long Island, where the shops were located. Here the young George grew up, and in the common school of the village was taught until he was old enough to enter as an apprentice the shop which his father superintended. Meanwhile, the civil war broke out. George was fired with desire to have a part in it, and soon after its outbreak, being yet a boy of twelve years of age, ran away to seek a recruiting station in the City. A police alarm discovered him and he was brought back to his parents in the custody of a policeman and was per¬ suaded to defer his military aspirations. He always retained a penchant for mili¬ tary affairs and in later years ran the whole gamut of the National Guard of his State, from a regimental assistant surgeon to surgeon, brigade surgeon and surgeon general. The Spanish American War found him at the height of his professional activities, but he did not hesitate to throw everything aside and put on the uni¬ form of his Country’s Army. He was commissioned a chief surgeon of division and was assigned to duty as medical inspector, consulting surgeon, and chief of the operating staff of the Seventh Army Corps, in which capacity he served throughout the war. That the apprentice boy, working at the bench in a railway repair shop should develop into a great surgeon was due—so Fowler himself used to say—to an accident in the shop when he was called on to assist in the care of the sufferers. The surgical instinct was then awakened in him. As it grew it was fostered and directed especially by two men who took an interest in him, one a pharmacist and the other a former army surgeon. The open, frank, and enthusiastic nature of the boy, which enlisted the help of these men in realizing his ambition, caused him in after years, when he had boys of his own, to show his grateful appreciation 1 Published by Surgical Pub. Co., Chicago, U.S.A.