Page:American Medical Biographies - Kelly, Burrage.djvu/1138

STRUDWICK 1116 SUCKLEY his habit of never employing applications to the interior of the uterus, but of advocating and using intrauterine injections of salt solu- tion. The most important operation of Dr. Strud- wick's career was one about which, unluckily, the record is meager. It was, however, prob- ably in 1842, that he successfully removed from a woman a large abdominal tumor, weighing thirty-six pounds. Dr. Strudwick was married in 1828, two years after beginning practice, to Ann Nash, whom he survived but two years. They had five children^two girls and three boys. The girls died in infancy, and two of the boys became doctors. He was exceedingly active and actually up to his final hours his energy was comparable to that of a dynamo. His fine condition of health was aided also by his simple habits. He was not a big eater, and was extremely temperate. He also had the gift of taking "cat naps" at any time or place — a habit that William Pepper, the younger, did so much to celebrate. Dr. Strudwick frequently slept in his chair. He was an early riser, his life long, the year round. And one of his invari- able rules — which illustrates the sort of stuff of which he was made — was to smoke six pipefuls of tobacco every morning before breakfast. He was a most insatiate consumer of tobacco, being practically never free from its influence. He bought all instruments and books as they came out. In a flap on the dashboard of his surrey he kept a bag in which were stored a small library and a miniature instru- ment shop. And often he would return with his carriage full of cohosh, boneset, etc., in- dicating his familiarity with medical botany. When nearly sixty years of age, he was called to a distant county to perform an oper- ation. Leaving on a 9 o'clock evening train, he arrived at his station about midnight and was met by the physician who had summoned him. Together they got into a carriage, and set out for the patient's home six miles in the country. The night was dark and cold ; the road was rough ; the horse became fright- ened at some object, ran away, upset the buggy and threw the occupants out, stunning the country doctor who, it was afterwards learned, was addicted to the opium habit, and break- ing Dr. Strudwick's leg just above the ankle. .•s soon as he had sufficiently recovered him- self, Dr. Strudwick called aloud, but no one answered and he then crawled to the side of the road and sat with his back against a tree. In the meantime the other physician, who had somehow managed to get into the buggy again, drove to the patient's home where for a time he could give no account of himself or his companion; but, coming out of his stupor, faintly remembered the occurrence and dis- patched a messenger to the scene of the acci- dent. When the carriage came back again at sunrise. Dr. Strudwick, who was still sit- ting against the tree, got in, drove to the. house, without allowing his own leg to be dressed, and sitting on the bed, operated upon the patient for strangulated hernia with a suc- cessful result. The going out of this great man's life was as tragic and unusual as his career had been brilliant and useful. In possession of his cus- tomary good health, at the age of seventy- seven, he succumbed to a fatal dose of atro- pine taken by mistake from drinking a glass of water in which the drug had been prepared for hypodermic employment in an emergency. He died at Hillsboro, North Carolina, in November, 1879. Hubert A. Royster. No. Carolina Med. Jour., 1880. vol. v, 129-136. .Abridged from a memoir by H. A. Royster. Suckley, George (1830-1869) George Suckley, physician, naturalist and explorer, son of John Lang Suckley, the author of "Secretions the Source of Pleasur- able Sensations" (New York, 1823), was born in New Y'ork in 1830. He graduated at the College of Physicians and Surgeons. New York, in 1851, and was resident surgeon in the New York Hospital in 1852. He was assistant surgeon in the United States Army from 1853 to 1856. Suckley accompanied Gen- eral Isaac I. Stevens on his expedition to the Pacific (1853-1854), returning by way of .A.sia and Europe, and in 1859 he went to Utah, where he acquired a knowledge of Indian languages. He was brigade surgeon in 1861. staff sur- geon to United States Volunteers from 1862 to 1865, and in 1865 was brevetted lieutenant- colonel and colonel. He was the author of a paper on "North American Salmonidae," read before the New York Lyceum of Natural History in 1861. He collaborated with James G. Cooper, M. D., in writing "The Natural History of Wash- ington Territory" (399 pp.. New York, 1859). Suckley contributed articles to the Annals. New York Lyceum, New York Journal of Medicine, and the Proceedings, Academy Nat- ural Sciences, Philadelphia. He died at New York, July 30, 1869. Howard A. Kelly.