Makers of Modern Medicine

"All that we can do is to say with resignation, 'Thy will be done,' and then we shall be sure that whatever happens will be for the best."

The story of O'Dwyer's death serves to illustrate some of the weaker points of modern medicine. During the nearly ten years after his wife's death he had never been quite the same man, but had succeeded in doing a large amount of work and had continued to care for a very large practice. In December, 1897, he began to develop some anomalous symptoms, pointing to a serious pathological condition within the skull. He seemed to have had what are known as "Ménière's symptoms," that is, a tendency to vertigo, some ringing in the ears and other unpleasant feelings. Toward the end of that month some hemiplegia, or at least some weakness of one side of his body, developed. He was rather neglectful of his personal health, as most physicians are, and until this time had paid very little attention to his symptoms. Most of the prominent New York consultants and nervous specialists were called in, but there was a marked disaccord as to the cause of the symptoms.

After some days in bed, comatose symptoms began to manifest themselves, and on January the seventh following, after having been lethargic for some days, Dr. O'Dwyer died. The antemortem diagnosis of his case was dubious, lying amid the possibilities of tubercular meningitis, secondary infection after otitis media, and secondary infection from some external cause. During the previous December, O'Dwyer had been treating a patient with carbuncle, and developed himself a small carbuncle on his chin. By some it is thought that infectious material from this lesion had been carried by emissary veins or their accompanying lymphatics to the inside of the skull, affecting the meninges, and perhaps portions of the brain-substance itself.

The postmortem examination did not entirely clear up the doubts of diagnosis. The lateral sinus was found thrombosed, while there were some suspicious signs in the middle ear, but no distinct inflammatory condition. Just how the infection took place, then, is not clear, but O'Dwyer's condition of lowered resistive vitality was evidently at fault, to an important degree, in permitting infection to take place and in not throwing it off afterward.

At the time of his death he was about fifty-seven years of age. He had reached the maturity of his powers, and with the consciousness of having accomplished one good work was ready for further original investigations in practical medicine. A thought that had occupied him very much toward the end of his life was the possibility of a mechanical method of treating pneumonia. He had made a series of experiments on the lungs, and many clinical observations with regard to the possibility of producing over-inflation by mechanical measures. He confided to one of his physician friends, who had been closest to him during life, that he hoped thus to secure a method of treating pneumonia successfully. This, after all, is the most serious problem in present-day medicine. Our death-rate from pneumonia is at least as high now as it was a century ago. O'Dwyer started from the observation that those suffering from emphysema seldom develop true pneumonia. And he hoped to prevent the progress of the disease, or to abort it in its inception, by producing artificial emphysema for the time being. Had he lived, it seems not unlikely that we would have had further original work of a high order from him.

Though of Irish descent, Dr. O'Dwyer illustrated very well the expression that was used of the English nobility who went to Ireland in Elizabeth's time, and who are said to have become "more Irish than the Irish themselves." O'Dwyer became an American of the Americans. He believed in meeting Americans on their own ground, cultivating their acquaintance, and making them realize the worth of new citizens of the republic by showing them how sincere was the patriotism of their recently admitted compatriots.

Dr. O'Dwyer was in everything the model of a Christian gentleman, and an exemplary member of the great humanitarian profession whose charitable opportunities he knew how to find and take advantage of at every turn in life. The American medical profession has never had a more worthy model of all that can be expected from physicians in their philanthropic duties toward suffering humanity, nor a better exemplar of what Christian manhood means in the widest sense of that expressive term. With an inventive genius of a high order, that gave him a prominent place in a great generation and that has stamped his name on the roll of medical fame for all time, there were united the simple faith, the earnest purpose, the clear-sighted judgment and the feeling kindness–those supreme qualities of head and heart that will always secure for him a prominent place in the small group of great medical men.