Medical and Surgical Journal), "we had the pleasure, together with some
twenty-five physicians, of spending the evening with him at the house of
a medical friend. While at the table one of the company proposed the
health of the venerable Dr. Brashear, 'the first and only surgeon in
Louisiana who had successfully performed amputation at the hip-joint.'
Mr. Clay, who sat next to Dr. Brashear, with characteristic good humor,
immediately observed, 'He has you on the hip, Doctor,' to the great
amusement of Brashear and the rest of the company."

Dr. Brashear was a man of fine literary taste and many and varied
accomplishments. In conversation he was always entertaining, often
brilliant. His voice was pleasant, his manners affable. In stature he
was short; in movement, quick and nervous. But in the make-up of the man
one essential of true greatness--fixedness of purpose--had been omitted.
He lacked the staying qualities. He was "variable and fond of change."
"His full nature, like that river of which Alexander broke the strength,
spent itself in channels which led to no great name on earth." By a
single exploit, at the age of thirty, he carved his name at high-water
mark among the elect in surgery. Most of his life thereafter he wasted
in desultory labors. As the learned Grotius said of his own life, he
consumed it in levities and strenuous inanities.

He died at an advanced age at his home in Louisiana.

1809. Three years after Brashear had won his unparalleled success at
Bardstown, a practitioner already of wide repute as a surgeon, living in
Danville, a neighboring village, did the second piece of original
surgical work in Kentucky. It consisted in removing an ovarian tumor.
The deed, unexampled in surgery, is destined to leave an ineffaceable
imprint on the coming ages. In doing it Ephraim McDowell became a prime
factor in the life of woman; in the life of the human race. By it he
raised himself to a place in the world's history, alongside of Jenner,
as a benefactor of his kind; nay, it may be questioned if his place be
not higher than Jenner's, since he opened the way for the largest
addition ever yet made to the sum total of human life.

So much has been written of this, McDowell's chief work, that I feel it
needless to dwell upon it. All students of our art are familiar with it
as presented by abler hands than mine. What I shall say of him,
therefore, will relate rather to his life and general work than to the
one