Education, Medical -- Massachusetts -- 19th century; Homeopathy; Libraries, Medical -- Massachusetts -- 19th century; Medicine
Dr. Lewis was a great favorite with students. He was a man of very
lively temperament, fond of old books and young people, open-hearted,
free-spoken, an enthusiast in teaching, and especially at home in that
apartment of the temple of science where nature is seen in undress, the
anthropotomic laboratory, known to common speech as the dissecting-room.
He had that quality which is the special gift of the man born for a
teacher,--the power of exciting an interest in that which he taught.
While he was present the apartment I speak of was the sunniest of
studios in spite of its mortuary spectacles. Of the students I met there
I best remember James Jackson, Junior, full of zeal and playful as a
boy, a young man whose early death was a calamity to the profession of
which he promised to be a chief ornament; the late Reverend J. S. C.
Greene, who, as the prefix to his name signifies, afterwards changed his
profession, but one of whose dissections I remember looking upon with
admiration; and my friend Mr. Charles Amory, as we call him, Dr. Charles
Amory, as he is entitled to be called, then, as now and always, a
favorite with all about him. He had come to us from the schools
of Germany, and brought with him recollections of the teachings of
Blumenbach and the elder Langenbeck, father of him whose portrait hangs
in our Museum. Dr. Lewis was our companion as well as our teacher. A
good demonstrator is,--I will not say as important as a good Professor
in the teaching of Anatomy, because I am not sure that he is not
more important. He comes into direct personal relations with the
students,--he is one of them, in fact, as the Professor cannot be from
the nature of his duties. The Professor's chair is an insulating stool,
so to speak; his age, his knowledge, real or supposed, his official
station, are like the glass legs which support the electrician's piece
of furniture, and cut it off from the common currents of the floor upon
which it stands. Dr. Lewis enjoyed teaching and made his students enjoy
being taught. He delighted in those anatomical conundrums to answer
which keeps the student's eyes open and his wits awake. He was happy as
he dexterously performed the tour de maitre of the old barber-surgeons,
or applied the spica bandage and taught his scholars to do it, so neatly
and symmetrically that the aesthetic missionary from the older centre of
civilization would bend over it in blissful contemplation, as if it were
a sunflower. Dr. Lewis had many other tastes, and was a favorite, not
only with students, but in a wide circle, professional, antiquarian,
masonic, and social.
Dr. Otis was less widely known, but was a fluent and agreeable lecturer,
and esteemed as a good surgeon.
I must content myself with this glimpse at myself and a few of my
fellow-students in Boston. After attending two courses of Lectures in
the school of the University, I went to Europe to continue my studies.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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