Complete Record - Heirs of Hippocrates No. 1883

LEWIS ALBERT SAYRE (1820-1900) Lectures on orthopedic surgery and diseases of the joints. D. Appleton and Company 1876 x, 476 [4] 30 [2] pp., 274 illus. 23 cm.

Sayre, a native of New Jersey, lost his father at age twelve and was raised in Lexington, Kentucky by an uncle. He attended Transylvania University and, determined to become a physician, enrolled at the College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York where he graduated in 1842. Sayre was surgeon at Bellevue Hospital and Charity Hospital on Blackwell's Island. He was a founder of Bellevue Medical College and taught there for many years. Sayre helped found the New York Academy of Medicine and the American Medical Association, acting as president of the latter group in 1880. He served as Resident Physician of New York City from 1860 to 1866 and instituted public health measures that were in advance of the time. Sayre has been called the father of American orthopedic surgery because of his pioneering efforts. He was the first in the United States to successfully resect the hip joint in 1854 and was also the first to use plaster-of-Paris as a support for the spinal column in scoliosis and Pott's disease in 1877. Sayre had been urged to write a work on orthopedic surgery for many years but declined to do so because "many of my views were so directly at variance with the standard authorities" (p. [vi]). He finally concluded that his extensive experience had confirmed his original views; however, since he had no time to write, he hired a stenographer to record the lectures he delivered at the Bellevue Medical College during the winter session of 1874-1875. Sayre added a few case reports but otherwise made few changes to the stenographer's manuscript and it appears here as recorded.

Cited references: Waller 8524 (London ed., 1876)