During the larger part of Dr. Dudley's life few physicians in any part of America devoted themselves exclusively to surgery. The most eminent surgeons were general practitioners--all-round men. In this class Dr. Dudley was equal to the best. In one respect, at least, he took advance ground--he condemned blood-letting. He was often heard to declare that every bleeding shortened the subject's life by a year. Admiring Abernethy more than any of his teachers, his opinions were naturally colored by the views of this eccentric Englishman. Like him he believed in the constitutional origin of local diseases, but his practice varied somewhat from that of his master. Like him he gave his patients blue pill at night but omitted the black draught in the morning. He thought an emetic better, and secured it by tartarized antimony. Between the puke and the purge his patients were fed on stale bread, skim milk, and water-gruel. And this heroic practice he pursued day after day, for weeks and months together, in spinal caries, hip caries, tuberculosis, urethral stricture and other diseases. I said that as a physician he was equal to the best. As we see things to-day this would not, perhaps, be saying much; but in fact he was better than the best. Negatively, if not positively, he improved upon the barbaric treatment of disease then in universal favor. He wholly discarded one of the most effective means by which the doctors succeeded in shortening the life of man. This was just before those biological dawnings which were soon to break into the full light of physiological medicine and the rational system of therapeutics based thereupon. And it is not improbable that as a watcher in that night of therapeutical darkness, where the doings of the best strike us with horror, his prophetic eye caught some glimpses of the coming day which in old age it was given him to see. Though engaged chiefly with the great things in surgery, he deserves a place in the list of therapeutic reformers.