of raising a laugh or eliciting a
little momentary applause descending to coarseness in expression or
thought. So that to his pupils he was always and everywhere great. As an
operator they thought he had distanced competition. As a teacher they
thought he gave them not what was in the books, but what the writers of
the books had never understood. They were persuaded that there was much
they must learn from his lips or learn not at all." His hold upon the
public was as great as that upon his classes. "Patients came to him from
afar because it was believed that he did better what others could do
than any one else, and that he did much which no one else in reach could
do."

During the larger part of Dr. Dudley's life few physicians in any part
of America devoted themselves exclusively to surgery. The most eminent
surgeons were general practitioners--all-round men. In this class Dr.
Dudley was equal to the best. In one respect, at least, he took advance
ground--he condemned blood-letting. He was often heard to declare that
every bleeding shortened the subject's life by a year. Admiring
Abernethy more than any of his teachers, his opinions were naturally
colored by the views of this eccentric Englishman. Like him he believed
in the constitutional origin of local diseases, but his practice varied
somewhat from that of his master. Like him he gave his patients blue
pill at night but omitted the black draught in the morning. He thought
an emetic better, and secured it by tartarized antimony. Between the
puke and the purge his patients were fed on stale bread, skim milk, and
water-gruel. And this heroic practice he pursued day after day, for
weeks and months together, in spinal caries, hip caries, tuberculosis,
urethral stricture and other diseases.

I said that as a physician he was equal to the best. As we see things
to-day this would not, perhaps, be saying much; but in fact he was
better than the best. Negatively, if not positively, he improved upon
the barbaric treatment of disease then in universal favor. He wholly
discarded one of the most effective means by which the doctors succeeded
in shortening the life of man. This was just before those biological
dawnings which were soon to break into the full light of physiological
medicine and the rational system of therapeutics based thereupon. And
it is not improbable that as a watcher in that night of therapeutical
darkness, where the doings of the best strike us with horror