he
thigh with great laceration of the soft parts. The subject was a mulatto
boy, seventeen years of age, a slave of the monks of St. Joseph's
College. The time was August, 1806; the place, Bardstown; the surgeon,
Dr. Walter Brashear; the assistants, Dr. Burr Harrison and Dr. John
Goodtell; the result, a complete success. The operator divided his work
into two stages. The first consisted in amputating the thigh through its
middle third in the usual way, and in tying all bleeding vessels. The
second consisted of a long incision on the outside of the limb, exposing
the remainder of the bone, which, being freed from its muscular
attachments, was then disarticulated at its socket.

Far-seeing as the eye of the frontiersman was, he could not have
discerned that the procedure by which he executed the most formidable
operation in surgery came so near perfection that it would successfully
challenge improvement for more than fourscore years.

Hundreds of hips have since been amputated after some forty different
methods; but that which he introduced has passed into general use, and
(though now known under the name of Furneaux Jordan's) remains the
simplest, the least dangerous, the best.

The first genuine hip-joint amputation executed on living parts was done
by Kerr, of Northampton, England, 1774. The first done for shot wounds
was by Larrey, in 1793. I feel safe in saying that Brashear had no
knowledge of either of these operations. He therefore set about his work
without help from precedent, placing his trust in himself, in the
clearness of his own head, in the skill of his own hands, in the courage
of his own heart. The result shows that he had not overestimated what
was in him. But whether or not Brashear had ever heard or read a
description of what had been accomplished in this direction by surgeons
elsewhere, the young Kentuckian was the first to amputate at the
hip-joint in America, and the first to do the real thing successfully in
the world.

Dr. Brashear seems to have set no high estimate on his achievement, and
never published an account of the case. Had he done so, the art of
surgery would thereby have been much advanced, his own fame have been
made one of the precious heritages of his country, and, what is better,
many valuable lives would have been saved.

Eighteen years after the Jesuits' slave had survived the loss of his
limb, the report of the much-eulogized case of Dr. Mott appeared.

Dr. Brashear came