Page:American Medical Biographies - Kelly, Burrage.djvu/964

PRICE 942 PRICE and a contributor to the proceedings of this honorable body of specialists. Price's great subjects for operation or for a paper before a society, or for a debate, were "Pus in the Pelvis," "Extra-uterine Preg- nancy," "Early Ovariotomy" and "Fibroid tumors ;" the vermiform appendix came in, too, for a large share of his attention. When he was known to be in attendance at a meet- ing, men flocked in and filled the room and crowded the aisles to enjoy his vigorous, spicy discussions. At first somewhat interrupted and hesitant in his speech, he soon warmed ud as he felt the sympathy of his audience, until like Stonewall Jackson dashing at the head of his troops, he carried friends and foes alike with him, as he graphically depicted the les- sons drawn from his large experience, and caustically flayed his opponents. His aggressive militancy for what he held to be the best interests of abdominal surgery is well illustrated by the following story, re- lated to me by Dr. Charles H. Mayo, an eye- witness. While Price and his associates in Philadelphia were zealously saving lives by their brilliant operations, a competitor was vaunting his simpler, safer cures of the same conditions by the Apostoli electric treatment. Price soon "camped on his trail," as he would express it, and closely followed his work over a series of months, or mayhap for several years. The electro-therapeutist finally an- nounced a paper on his methods before the College of Physicians of Philadelphia. Price significantly asked Dr. Mayo, then visiting him, to be present, as the meeting "was likely to be interesting." Before the hour a dray drove up to the hall and a great number of jars containing big and little tumors and speci- mens were unloaded and deposited on a long table in front of the speaker's desk. Then followed Price, who took a little pad out of his pocket and busied himself writing slips and attaching them to the jars. The electro- therapeutist read his paper and cited the numerous patients cured by his conservative methods. Whenever the initials were given, Price put additional notes on the slips on the jars. The denouement came when the sub- ject was thrown open for discussion. Price arose, one by one named the cases cured and then exhibited the morbid specimens he had afterwards removed from the patients ; a big fibroid cut open to show the streaks of the intense cauterization, and the fact that the growth was uninfluenced ; in another case he demonstrated that the needles had penetrated the uterine wall at a point remote from the growth ; another patient had acquired "a vicious intestinal adhesion," jeopardizing the operation. The tubes of a "cured" pelvic in- flammatofy mass were picked up and incised and the pus flowed out. The effect was so crushing that the adversary had the pity of the hearers, but the therapeutics were anni- hilated and electro-therapy received its death blow. Bitter and unrelenting as a foe. Price was generous to the extreme to friends. He had not the habit of mind for the writing of a scientific or a technical paper, but he saw vvfith prophetic vision the next greater steps to be taken in surgery, he grasped them him- self and then turned round to pull the rest of the world up to his standpoint, and be- fore he quitted the scene, everyone had in fact gone his way. One of the most difficult, nay the impossible task of a biographer is to grasp and depict such a personality and to measure the influence of a man like Joseph Price, and yet as great pioneers such men as he and his brother Mordecai often accomplish more for humanity than many who have poured forth much wis- dom from the laboratory. Alas, the aroma of such a life is evanescent and the pen is inadequate to draw the picture. Those who knew him well chuckle or grow pensive and sorrowful as they recall the talks and the walks and the tours and the operations in which they have been associated with him, and one and all are apt to end up with "Dear old Joe, I wish he were here now." Those who came on the scene later can never know him. Price died of an infection (to which he was ever liable), a universal retro-peritoneal involvement of all the glands in the abdomen, so that in spite of his hurry call to his fol- lower, J. W. Kennedy, to operate, he passed out of the field of his great labors, June 8, 1911. He received the honorary degree of LL. D. from Union College but a month be- fore his death. There is a good portrait in his biography by Dr. Kennedy in the American Journal of Obstetrics for January, 1912. Howard A. Kelly. Price, Mordecai (1844-1904) The son of Joshua and Feby Moore Price, Mordecai graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1869 and became one of the most eminent abdominal surgeons and gyne- cologists of Philadelphia and an operator of repute. He was born in Rockingham County, Virginia, in 1844, and came to Philadelphia