1813. While McDowell was so busily engaged in his special line of surgery, his colaborers elsewhere in the State were not idle. Four years after his first ovariotomy, the first complete extirpation of the clavicle ever done was accomplished by Dr. Charles McCreary, living in Hartford, Ohio County, Ky., two hundred miles, as the crow would fly, farther into the wilderness. The patient was a lad named Irvin. The disease for which the operation was done was said to be scrofulous. Recovery was slow but complete. The use of the arm remained unimpaired, and the patient lived, in good health, to be forty-nine years old. In 1829, sixteen years after the back-woods surgeon had achieved his success, Professor Mott repeated the operation, also on a youth, with a like fortunate result, and, believing he was first in the field, claimed the honor of the procedure for the United States, for New York, and for himself. He termed it his "Waterloo operation," not, however, because it surpassed, as he declared, in tediousness, difficulty, and danger any thing he had ever witnessed or performed, but because, as it appears, it fell on the 18th of June, the anniversary of the battle of Waterloo. Mott's operation required nearly four hours for its execution, and the tying of forty vessels; but after all it proved to be not a complete extirpation; for the autopsy, made many years later, showed three quarters of an inch of the bone at the acromial end still in its place. Yet the case passed quickly into the annals of surgery and added much to the already great renown of the operator. To this day it is referred to by surgical writers as "Mott's celebrated case," and the description of his procedure is often given in his own words. McCreary removed the entire collar bone, and that while a young practitioner, living in a village composed of a few scattering houses, situated in a new and sparsely settled country, where opportunities for cultivating surgical science were necessarily rare, and the means for acquiring anatomical knowledge necessarily small. The only published report of McCreary's case is from the pen of Dr. Johnson, in the New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal for January, 1850. The account, though all too brief, clearly establishes the date of the operation, its successful issue, and the removal of the entire bone. It is greatly to be regretted that more is not known of McCreary's personal and professional character. He is said, by one who met him often, to have been a serious, thoughtful man, given to study, devoted to his calling, and fatally fond of drink, to which he fell a victim when but thirty-seven years of age.