e, and natural. He was a simple, ingenuous
man. His great deeds had given him no arrogance. His was a clean,
strong, vigorous life. His spirit remained sweet and true and modest to
the last. He lived a God-fearing man, and died on June 25, 1830, in the
communion of the Episcopal Church.

1813. While McDowell was so busily engaged in his special line of
surgery, his colaborers elsewhere in the State were not idle. Four years
after his first ovariotomy, the first complete extirpation of the
clavicle ever done was accomplished by Dr. Charles McCreary, living in
Hartford, Ohio County, Ky., two hundred miles, as the crow would fly,
farther into the wilderness. The patient was a lad named Irvin. The
disease for which the operation was done was said to be scrofulous.
Recovery was slow but complete. The use of the arm remained unimpaired,
and the patient lived, in good health, to be forty-nine years old.

In 1829, sixteen years after the back-woods surgeon had achieved his
success, Professor Mott repeated the operation, also on a youth, with a
like fortunate result, and, believing he was first in the field, claimed
the honor of the procedure for the United States, for New York, and for
himself. He termed it his "Waterloo operation," not, however, because it
surpassed, as he declared, in tediousness, difficulty, and danger any
thing he had ever witnessed or performed, but because, as it appears,
it fell on the 18th of June, the anniversary of the battle of Waterloo.

Mott's operation required nearly four hours for its execution, and the
tying of forty vessels; but after all it proved to be not a complete
extirpation; for the autopsy, made many years later, showed three
quarters of an inch of the bone at the acromial end still in its place.
Yet the case passed quickly into the annals of surgery and added much to
the already great renown of the operator. To this day it is referred to
by surgical writers as "Mott's celebrated case," and the description of
his procedure is often given in his own words.

McCreary removed the entire collar bone, and that while a young
practitioner, living in a village composed of a few scattering houses,
situated in a new and sparsely settled country, where opportunities for
cultivating surgical science were necessarily rare, and the means for
acquiring anatomical knowledge necessarily small.

The only published report of McCreary's case is from the pen of Dr.
Johnson, in the New Orleans Medical a