"If I were asked what most contributed to Dr. O'Dwyer's medical excellence I would say his habit of thinking and his good logic. He had a good medical mind, an excellent medical judgment. Above all, that quality of intellect which allows a man to grow after the age of forty. To the New York Foundling Asylum, with which Dr. O'Dwyer was connected for twenty-five years, he was everything; to the maternity service he was the expert obstetrician; in intubation he was the inventor and teacher; in the general medical service he was the constant consulting mind, whose opinion in times of difficulties and in the midst of puzzling clinical problems every one voluntarily sought. To the Sisters of Charity he was physician and friend, consulted with regard to every important concern of the house, whether medical or not. All adored him." Dr. O'Dwyer's domestic life was most happy. He had married, very suitably, a woman of bright disposition, who was a foil to his own soberer and more melancholy ways, and the relations between husband and wife growing tenderer with the progress of years, their home-life became the model {351} of an ideal Christian family. When he lost her through death, more than half of his life seemed to have gone, and he never quite recovered from the blow. The circumstances of her death added to his sense of loss, as it must have increased his appreciation of her worth. She died a martyr to what she considered her duty as a Christian mother. During the course of a pregnancy she was taken with what is known as pernicious vomiting, an affection that is likely to prove fatal unless the irritated uterus should be relieved of its burden--a means that neither she nor her husband would consent to adopt. Her death thus was the result. During the years after the death of the doctor's wife, intimate friends found out what an effort of Christian fortitude it was for him to keep up his spirits and his work. Though he was one of the busiest of professional men, in very active practice, not a week passed but he found time to go to her grave and put flowers thereon. Just after her death he was as a man stricken by some dazing mental affection. Yet his sense of duty was so great that on his return from her funeral, being informed that a little child suffering from diphtheria needed his services for the performance of intubation, he at once made haste to comply with the untimely demand on him, and had given the little patient relief within the quarter of an hour after he had alighted from the funeral carriage.