The Faculty and the Board of Trustees decided to change the order of instruction from winter to summer with the Second Session to begin on 24 July 1865, and the third and subsequent Sessions to begin on the first of June. The principal reason for the change was the exceptional suitability of the cool summer season in San Francisco for medical studies. [54]
At the beginning of the Second Session, Dr. Toland again gave the Introductory Lecture. On this occasion he eulogized Valentine Mott who had died recently in New York (on 26 April 1865). He greatly admired Mott's technical virtuosity, referring to his ligation of the innominate artery as a famous operation, entitling him "to occupy the highest position as a surgeon." He deplored the unjust criticism Professor Mott endured from his enemies who accused him of egotism because he preserved and exhibited the ligature from the innominate artery to his class. Toland reminded the students that "it was not as a lecturer that (Mott) acquired his great and extensive reputation, but by his originality and dexterity as an operator" - an observation applicable to both Cooper and Toland himself. [55]
At the annual Commencement ending the Second Session of Toland Medical College, the M. D. degree was conferred on four graduates. The Valedictory Address by Professor Morse, enlivened by sarcasm and his usual eloquent delivery, was highly appreciated by the large audience of ladies and gentlemen. It was announced that the third Session of the College would commence on the first Monday of June in 1866 and terminate on the last day of September, thus presumably establishing the schedule to be followed in future years. [56] [57]
Several faculty changes occurred after the end of the Second Session. Professor Brown resigned the chair of Anatomy by reason of ill-health and objections to changing his residence from San Jose to San Francisco. The chair of Anatomy was assumed by Dr. Lane whose chair of Physiology was taken by Dr. Ayres. The name of the Physiology chair was changed to Institutes of Medicine with the result that Dr. Ayres became Professor of Institutes of Medicine while his chair of Theory and Practice of Medicine was absorbed by Dr. Morse whose title became Professor of the Theory and Practice of Medicine, and Clinical Medicine and Diagnosis. [58]
Professor Oxland, having removed from California, relinquished the chair of Chemistry which was filled by the appointment of Thomas Price, M. D., Professor of Chemistry in the University (City) College of San Francisco, a gentleman of high standing in the community as a practical and theoretical chemist, and an efficient teacher of science. He proved to be compatible with the Cooper contingent on the Toland Faculty. [59] [60]
Due to these changes, the Faculty stood as follows at the beginning of the Third Session:
Toland College Faculty 1866
H. H. Toland, M. D., President
Professor of Principles and Practice of Surgery
James Blake, M. D.,
Professor of Obstetrics and Diseases of Women and Children
Levi C. Lane, M. D.,
Professor of Anatomy
W. O. Ayer, M. D., Dean
Professor of Institutes of Medicine
J. F. Morse, M. D.,
Professor of the Theory and Practice of Medicine, and Clinical Medicine and Diagnosis
Thos. Bennett, M. D.,
Professor of General Pathology
Henry Gibbons, Sr., M. D.,
Professor of Materia Medica
Thomas Price, M. D.,
Professor of Chemistry
Third Annual Session of Toland Medical College
4 June to 2 October 1866.
The Opening Address was delivered on the 4th of June by Professor Lane. His remarks revealed a nostalgia for the Cooper school not previously expressed openly and with such feeling: [61]
| Some seven years ago, there was founded in this city a Medical College, known as the "Medical Department of the University of the Pacific." This School, which, for a season, had a severe struggle for existence, to which it would have succumbed had it not been for the indomitable energy of its founder, finally outlived the opposition which had been waged against it, and attained to what seemed a permanent foothold among the literary establishments of this Coast. Under its auspices a number of young men were invested with the toga virilis of medical manhood, whose subsequent careers bear ample evidence of the correctness of their teaching, and whose professional success would be flattering testimonial to any Alma Mater. But, unfortunately, as the first sunbeams began to fall upon this infant edifice, the finger of death snatched from it the master spirit to whom it owed its foundation. The ashes of its founder, the late Dr. Cooper, now repose beneath a simple obelisk in the adjacent city of the dead; - the structure which he had reared, no longer sustained by his inspiring energy, like an arch bereft of its keystone, did not long survive him. |
Dr. Lane also had the following complimentary words for Dr. Toland, suggesting thereby that the Cooper group was at the time satisfied with conditions at Toland College:
|
At that period, now near two years ago, a gentleman of this city, whom fortune has singularly favored in his profession, and who had long ago conceived the plan of founding a Medical School on this Coast, now deemed the occasion a fortunate one for executing his long-cherished project. The experience of the previous school had already demonstrated the fact that such an institution was one of the wants of the Pacific States; and in establishing it, he determined that, in thoroughness and completeness of teaching, it should leave nothing undone to fit young men for the practice of Medicine; in fact, that it should rival the best of similar institutions in the Atlantic States. As pecuniary embarrassments have frequently blighted the prospects of several of our Eastern Medical Schools, to forego all misfortune from this cause, and set an example which few could and still fewer would imitate, he erected a building at his own expense, which could not have been little, from the manorial character of the edifice we today occupy. This done, he chose a Faculty and a Board of Trustees, and to the latter he confided the care of the Institution, which, in justice to him as founder and donor, has been named Toland Medical College. And further, as evidence of his disinterestedness, he has remitted all the fees pertaining to his Chair, that of Surgery; and besides, that the school should lose everything of a private character, he has bequeathed it wholly to the State of California, a magnificent gift to her and the Science of Medicine; and, if I predict aright, it is destined to be, in the future, the cherished resort of the young men of our State, who may desire to qualify themselves for the practice of our noble profession. |
At the Annual Commencement of the third Session on 2 October 1866, the degree of Doctor of Medicine was conferred on ten graduates. The Valedictory Address by Professor Bennett, deemed "exceedingly appropriate and eloquent," was delivered to an attentive audience, most of whom were ladies, which completely filled the hall.
Dean Ayres Resigns, Professor Bennett Elected Dean. Professor Ayres resigned the deanship and his professorial appointment with regret because his absence from the city during the forthcoming Session would make it impossible for him to perform the duties of these positions. The following minutes of the Tolman Faculty Meeting of 17 April 1867 deal with the question of his replacement: [62] [63]
|
The President announced that he had verbally received from Dr. Ayres his resignation of the Chair of Physiology and his office of Dean of the Faculty. The announcement was received and accepted. Dr. Bennett nominated Dr. J. Campbell Shorb to fill the Chair of Physiology. Dr. Blake seconded the nomination. Dr. Gibbons nominated Dr. James P. Whitney . Dr. Morse seconded the nomination. On vote being taken, Dr. Shorb was elected. On motion of the President, the Faculty then proceeded to elect a Dean. On the first vote Drs. Lane and Bennett had a tie vote. On the second vote, Dr. Bennett was elected. |
The election of Dr. Shorb to succeed Dr. Ayres as Professor of Physiology, and of Professor Bennett to replace him as Dean was considered by the respected historian of California Medicine, Henry Harris, [64] to be evidence of a developing rift between partisans of the late Cooper, namely Lane, Gibbons, Morse and Price, and the other members of the Toland Faculty. While It is difficult to find in the collected minutes of the Toland Faculty significant evidence of dissension, such records being usually sanitized, we shall soon see that Dean Bennett did not hesitate to publicly demean his colleague, Dr. Gibbons. Such unkindness was more than suggestive of tension among the professors.
Fourth Annual Session of Toland Medical College
3 June to 10 October 1867
The session opened with an Introductory Lecture by Professor Gibbons who could always be counted on for entertaining as well as cogent remarks. He concluded the Lecture by urging the importance of overcoming popular opposition to dissection of the human body for scientific purposes: [65]
| The same irrational prejudice which would prohibit all dissections of the dead body, also interferes with examinations after death for the purpose of ascertaining the seat and nature of disease. Physicians should strive to educate the popular mind on this point by making examinations whenever practicable. . .Let me urge the propriety of making post mortem examinations in all cases where consent can be obtained. To young physicians is this especially important. It familiarizes them with the use of the scalpel, and perfects their knowledge of Anatomy, to some extent. It imparts knowledge, positive or negative, in regard to disease. It familiarizes the popular mind to a great necessity of science. |
The graduation exercises of the Fourth Session were held in the American Theatre on the evening of 10 October 1867. Seven graduates were awarded M. D. degrees. Professor Blake, who had been appointed to deliver the Valedictory Address, lost his voice from an attack of bronchitis. He therefore requested that the Valedictory be read for him by Professor Bennett who was also now the Dean, having been elected just prior to the Session to succeed Dr. Ayres.
At a meeting of the Toland Medical Faculty on 5 November 1867 Professor Bennett was reelected as Dean of the College, his first term having expired in October.
Fifth Annual Session of Toland Medical College
6 July to 5 November 1868
Beginning with this Session, the opening date of the Lecture Course was again changed. This and future Sessions were scheduled to begin on the first Monday of July instead of June as formerly. It was reasoned that it would still be possible with the July start date to complete the four months' course before the beginning of the winter rains. The Fifth Session opened with an Introductory Lecture by Professor Price. [66] [67]
At the Commencement exercises on November 5th 1868, Professor Morse delivered the Valedictory Address to a large and interested audience, a considerable proportion of which was composed of Ladies. After the Address Dean Bennett conferred degrees on six graduates. [68]
During the Fifth Session there was an extracurricular development that deserves comment. Internecine strife within San Francisco's medical community seemed to abate with the demise of the medical societies which provided the venue for the factional disputes with which we are already familiar. Also conducive to a more collegial atmosphere was the merging in 1865 of the Pacific Medical and Surgical Journal and the San Francisco Medical Press under the editorship of the refined and scrupulous Henry Gibbons Sr. He was joined by his able son, Henry Gibbons, Jr., as Associate Editor in 1867. Under the management of these diligent and respected medical journalists, the Pacific Medical and Surgical Journal acquired the national respect it could not enjoy while being used for unseemly personal attacks such as those of Wooster on Elias Cooper and of Stillman on Toland.
We mentioned previously that the Faculty of Toland Medical College voted a subsidy to the Journal in 1864 to assure ample favorable attention to College affairs. That subsidy was discontinued in 1867. Although Editor Gibbons did not exercise his editorial pen vigorously in promoting the College, such matters as schedules of Annual Sessions, lists of graduates, Faculty changes, Introductory Lectures and Valedictory Addresses were adequately reported. Proceedings of the renascent medical societies such as the San Francisco Medical Society which Dr. Gibbons was anxious to encourage were well covered and physicians in the region were stimulated to submit original articles. Under the editorship of the Gibbonses, the Journal thus assumed a non-partisan, intellectual tone with journalistic invective and the airing of professional rivalries strictly proscribed. [69]
In the Summer of 1868, when the Journal was prospering and gaining distinction as the sole voice of the profession on the West Coast, a new monthly publication appeared in San Francisco, the California Medical Gazette. The Editor of the Gazette was none other than Professor (and Dean) Thomas Bennett. First Assistant Editor was Professor J. Campbell Shorb. Both were, of course, colleagues of Professor Gibbons on the Faculty of Toland Medical College. It has been inferred from voting behavior in Faculty meetings, and Lane's loss in his bid for the deanship, that there was polarization within the College Faculty. If so, the gravity of the schism was not fully apparent until Dean Bennett introduced the first issue of the Gazette with a "Salutatory" containing disparaging remarks about the Journal. This critique reflected unfavorably on Editor Gibbons who took stern exception to it. The following excerpts from the Salutatory include the objectionable comments: [70]
|
For some years past, the profession has not been without an organ, in which they could disseminate their opinions, and mutually convey and receive instruction. A medical journal has in fact been published in San Francisco for ten years (i. e. the Pacific Medical and Surgical Journal). From various causes, which it is unnecessary to mention, this journal has never met with cordial support or cooperation from the profession; its career has never met with success. Nevertheless, under varying vicissitudes and many editorial changes, it has lived on - today, certainly, brighter and better than at any former portion of its existence. Still it does not, and never has, worthily represented the profession on the Pacific Coast. With this feeling, and in the earnest hope and desire to produce a journal that shall be worthy of the medical profession here, and represent it properly abroad, we have been induced to issue the California Medical Gazette. |
To this pompous indictment of his Journal, Professor Gibbons responded at once with an editorial in the August 1868 issue: [71]
|
. . .Certain it is that the several editors of the Journal, and its contributors and patrons, have done nearly all that has ever been done in California for medical association, medical education and medical literature. And it illy becomes those who have been sleeping at their post whilst the work was going on, and who now step in to reap a harvest which they did not plant, to fling discredit on the old and faithful laborers in the field. . . To be forced into these personal matters is extremely distasteful to us. It is the first time we have ever received any other treatment from a contemporary than kindness and courtesy. We have never had a word to say against another journal, or against members of the profession. Nor have we been in the habit of lauding ourselves and assuming to be the exclusive representatives of the profession. But we now take the liberty to assert that our Journal does represent the profession of the Pacific Coast and is in harmony with it, excepting a few individuals in San Francisco who are actuated by motives of personal character by no means creditable to them. . . |
Editors Bennett and Gibbons then both issued rebuttals, each claiming the high ground. These exchanges of unpleasantries set the stage for more serious contention over larger issues to be addressed in the second and final volume of the short-lived Gazette. Senior Editor of Volume 2 (September 1869 through August 1870) was the acid-penned J. D. B Stillman, who now assumed the role of defender of the Toland Medical College whose founder he had previously accused of plagiary. [72] [73]
Sixth Annual Session of Toland Medical College
1 July to 3 November 1869
Professor Shorb delivered the Introductory Lecture on the subject of the "Benevolence of Medicine" which was printed in full in Volume I of the California Medical Gazette. In referring to the triumphs of medicine, Dr. Shorb cited quinine, opium and chloroform as among medicine's most significant benefactions to mankind. His representation of chloroform as the agent responsible for the advent of anesthesia was particularly unfortunate. He did not so much as mention ether and was apparently unaware that the Pacific Medical and Surgical Journal (and other medical journals world-wide) had for years reported the lethal properties of chloroform and the relative safety of ether. As recently as January 1868, in an editorial in the PMSJ, Dr. Henry Gibbons, Jr., had warned that the high incidence of death from chloroform represented a fearful mortality and "shows also the magnitude of the responsibility which those who persist in giving chloroform take upon themselves, when a far safer anesthetic, equally reliable, is at hand."[74] [75] [76]
Not content to drop the subject, Dr. Stillman got out of his depth and wrote an editorial entitled "Chloroform Versus Ether" in the May 1870 issue of Volume 2 of the Gazette. He implied that the danger of chloroform was probably no greater than that from ether, and stated that it is fear of the operation which produces the physiological conditions conducive to death from anesthetics. "When the patient has no fear for the operation, I have none in administering chloroform." Paradoxically, Stillman followed his editorial with a report from the British Medical Journal of a 22 year-old woman under operation for ovarian tumor. Sir James Y. Simpson, who originally introduced the agent, was administering chloroform himself while a colleague performed the surgery. Sir James placed over both nose and mouth a single layer of towel and on it dropped chloroform - a method likely to prevent adequate ventilation. In the midst of the operation, as he watched from the head of the table, the patient suddenly collapsed and could not be resuscitated. A not untypical sequence of events in the many fatalities then attributable to chloroform. To his credit, Sir James fully and frankly reported the tragedy, with not the slightest evasion, as "a case of death from chloroform." [77]
Even as the May issue of the Gazette went to press, the world-acclaimed Sir James was mortally ill. He died on 6 May 1870. His last medical writing was a letter to Dr. Jacob Bigelow of Boston with whom he was engaged in controversy over chloroform vs. ether. Like many of his contemporaries, Sir James not only found it difficult to accept the prohibitive lethality of chloroform, but also could not adjust to other developments in the rapidly changing times. For example, To the very end Sir James persisted in his rejection of the Listerian doctrine of antisepsis. [78] [79] [80]
Illness of Professor Morse. During the latter part of the Sixth Session, Professor Morse was obliged to leave the city and go abroad because of ill health, thus depriving Lane, Gibbons and Price of a valued colleague. In January of 1870 Dr. Morse was reported in the PMSJ to be in Naples, much improved of his rheumatism. [81] [82]
University of California Opens. On 23 September 1869 the University of California admitted its first class consisting of about forty students under the instruction of a Faculty of ten members. The University had its remote origin in a small secondary school known as the College School, established in Oakland in 1853 by the visionary Reverend Henry Durant. It is said that the Reverend came to California "with college on the brain," and that he left his Congregational parish in Byfield, Massachusetts, for the West "with the purpose of founding a university fully formed in his mind." The College School was succeeded by the post-secondary College of California in 1860. Through negotiations, which included ceding its properties consisting of real estate in Oakland and vacant land in Berkeley, the College of California was taken over by the State and became the University of California. The Charter of the University was signed by Governor Haight on 23 March 1868. The University classes met in the Oakland facilities of the College of California from 1869 until the graduation of the class of 1873 when commencement exercises were held in the new university buildings then nearing completion at the present site in Berkeley.
The first Professor to be appointed to the University was John Le Conte, M. D., graduate of the College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York. He was a man of broad scientific interests who no longer practiced medicine. His appointment at the University of California was as Professor of Physics. At the time of this appointment he was serving as Professor and Chairman of the Department of Physics in South Carolina College at Columbia. Upon arriving in California in March 1869, Professor Le Conte was given the responsibility to organize the University for its opening in September and on 14 June 1869 he was named Acting President. We shall later see how he came to join the medical faculty of Hugh Toland as Professor of Physiology in 1870. Dr. Toland was also a former resident of Columbia, South Carolina.
On 16 August 1870 Reverend Durant, founder of the predecessor College School, was elected first President of the University. Upon his retirement the able Daniel C. Gilman, of Yale background, was formally installed in Oakland as the University of California's second President on 7 November 1872. [83]
Professor Lane's Valedictory. The Commencement exercises concluding the Sixth Session of the Toland School took place on the third of November 1869. Dean Bennett awarded nine medical degrees. Professor Lane delivered the Valedictory Address, a wide-ranging view of medicine in antiquity and literature, interspersed with classical allusions and concluding with an inspirational charge to the graduates: [84]
| Equipped, then, Gentlemen, with these principles of science and virtue, you will go forth to the world upon no uncertain mission; a high and noble sphere will be yours, since to you suffering humanity will ever turn its eyes for aid and relief. Now, as your Alma Mater bids you adieu, she would fain say, as she clings to you in parting, never prove unworthy of the great profession into which, this day, as equal members, she has introduced you; and, though Fame as yet sounds no note in your behalf, still, if you will turn your ears and listen closely, you will catch the sounds of her trumpet echoing from the early-coming years. |
Even as he spoke, Professor Lane was privately contemplating his own departure from the Toland College. He had not found there the collegial spirit and institutional goals that still held the members of the former Cooper Faculty in patient expectation, awaiting the call to revive the old school.