Ohio History Journal

  • 1
  •  
  • 2
  •  
  • 3
  •  
  • 4
  •  
  • 5
  •  
  • 6
  •  
  • 7
  •  
  • 8
  •  

268 OHIO ARCHEOLOGICAL AND HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

268     OHIO ARCHEOLOGICAL AND HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

 

with difficulty that we refrain from being surprised at ourselves. And our

culture dwarfs that of our fathers to insignificance. We cannot be expected

to judge values according to the standards of a culture which, to us, ap-

pears so naive, so childlike, so unintelligent and emotionally unstable. But

sometimes, when our present world is a bit too much with me, the strident

voice of the news broadcaster comes to me from long ago and far away,

and I hear, from underneath the trees of a firelit camp-ground, the voice

of a Son of Thunder. He is speaking to me, and what he says makes me

ponder.

"Open the Pit of Hell, O Lord, and show these snivelling

sinners Thy torments! Show them their brothers and their sisters,

their mothers and their fathers, gnashing their teeth and gnawing at

their chains. Make them believe, O Lord! Knock them down!

Knock them down, and show them Thy wrath to come!"

 

AN OHIO SURGEON IN PARIS, 1835-1836

By PHILIP D. JORDAN

 

In December, 1835, a twenty-eight-year-old American naval surgeon

took rooms on a narrow Parisian street near the great French clinics and

hospitals which then were the world's leading teaching institutions for young

physicians.1

Dr. Louis A. Wolfley, assistant surgeon on the U. S. S. Delaware,

had obtained leave2 to devote eight months to furthering his medical educa-

tion begun in Cincinnati in November, 1829, at the Ohio Medical College.3

Born in Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania on February 19, 1807, Wolfley had

come to Circleville, Ohio, in 1829 with his brother-in-law, Dr. William N.

Luckey. In Circleville, Wolfley helped Luckey mix drugs and roll pills.

Such apprenticeship had been his only preparation for further schooling in

Cincinnati. There, during the winter and spring terms of 1829, this tall

young man listened attentively to the brilliant anatomy lectures of Jedediah

Cobb, and there also, he received his first formal introduction to nineteenth

century chemistry, pharmacy, materia medica, surgery, and the theory and

practice of medicine.

After his graduation in June, 1830, Wolfley did not return to Athens

where he had previously practiced by rule of thumb, but he opened an office

in Lancaster, Ohio, a community of fifteen hundred persons.4  There he

successfully courted Eleanor Ann Irvin, daughter of Judge William W.

Irvin, member of Congress. Wolfley also became acquainted with Senator

1 This paper, dealing especially with the Parisian phase of Dr. Wolfley's career,

is an abridgment of a more extended article prepared by the author and by Howard

D. Kramer, of the State University of Iowa.

2 Mediterranean Cruise, October 9, 1834, Wolfley MSS.; Woodbury to Patterson,

Washington, March 24, 1835, Wolfley MSS.

3 Registrar's office of College of Medicine, University of Cincinnati.

4 See Wolfley's advertisements in Lancaster Gazette, April 5-19, 1830.