James Bell / [Edward Archibald].

  • Archibald, Edward.
Date:
[1923]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: James Bell / [Edward Archibald]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    ROY MOODIE COLLECTION. Reprint from SURGERY, GYNECOLOGY AND OBSTETRICS July, IQ2J, pages 03-06 JAMES BELL ^ By EDWARD ARCHIBALD, M.D,, F.A.C.S., Montreal, Canada The death of James Bell on April ii, 1911, was no less a surprise than a shock to the large circle of his friends and admirers throughout Canada and the United States; a shock naturally, but a surprise also, in that the cause of his death was appendicitis, a malady the treatment of which he had been one of the earliest in Canada to establish on sure and safe foundations. It was one of those retrocaecal and gangrenous forms causing acute toxaemia, without clear localizing signs, which kill within a few days. His illness indeed lasted only 6 days. Of its kind it was a tragedy. He had been in perfect health, and, though no longer young (he was in his fifty-ninth year), he could still look forward to not a few years of useful work. His unusual skill as an operator was unimpaired, and his judgment, always sound and now ripened by great experience, was at its height. His reputation was no small one on this continent, and was still growing. Always quiet, unobtrusive, and essentially modest, he was nevertheless full of a clinical wisdom which made all that he wrote or said upon surgical subjects immediately attractive and arresting in the minds of the thoughtful. Few were his words but clear his vision. In diagnosis he was quick, accurate, always steady, and frequently brilliant; and this through a certain gift of intuition, meaning thereby that he seized immediately on the essential, and refused to be diverted by the unessential. On the therapeutic side, he was slow to operate but quick in operating; and, the operation once begun, his judgment in determining what to do and what not to do was extraordinarily sound. His technique, at a time when technique was not so carefully considered as in these latter days,— not considered, let us say, the be-all and end-all of surgery, was almost flawless; and his results in wound healing equalled those of the present day. In person he was largely built, athletic, and had the fair hair, the ruddy cheeks, and the blue eyes of the North man. A noted boxer in his youth, and a rider to hounds in his middle years, he retained a large measure of his great physical endurance to the end of his life. In character, James Bell was distinguished particularly by a straightforward honesty, without, however, anything of the simple in it, which went at once to the heart of a matter, scientific or other, and brooked no devious road. ‘‘Bell’s sniff” was a thing widely known. It signified disagreement, and even a certain im¬ patience, not often amounting to contempt (for he was on the whole inclined Published by Surgical Pub. Co., Chicago, TJ.S.A. I