to a less extent, of surgery, gave him the real capital with which he started in practice, after graduating with honor in 1858.
General medicine, obstetrics, essays on medical topics in popular vein in the Atlantic Monthly and the North American Review, now engaged Cheever's attention. In 1859 the care of the smallpox hospital during an epidemic was eagerly accepted; in 1860 the winning of the Boylston Prize Essay brought reputation and a small stipend—such were the humble beginnings of a great career, as yet undirected into its final channel.
In 1860, Oliver Wendell Holmes, whose attention had been attracted to Cheever's industry in the dissecting room, offered him the position of demonstrator of anatomy, just vacated by Richard M. Hodges. Thus began a career of thirty-three years of teaching in the Harvard Medical School. For eight years he personally prepared the lecture demonstrations for Dr. Holmes and revolutionized the teaching in the dissecting room by the introduction of competitive student dissections and quizzes. He had the gift of teaching, perhaps inherited from his ancestor, Ezekiel Cheever, one of the earliest and most famous of the Masters of the Boston Latin School.
In 1864, the Boston City Hospital was founded and Cheever was made visiting surgeon, a rare opportunity in surgery for so young a man, who also in his teaching position had endless opportunities to practise operations on the cadaver. His colleagues, of the defunct Boylston Medical School, not connected with the conservative and established order represented by Harvard and the Massachusetts General Hospital, opened clinics, struggled for students, started novelties, and soon were rewarded by receiving appointments in Harvard. This inaugurated the present mutually advantageous relationship between hospital and school. Cheever originated or revived unusual operations, wrote and published widely, and edited the first five volumes of the Hospital reports, much of the surgical text being from his pen; he was also for a time editor of the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal. From the position of demonstrator of anatomy (1861–1866) he was advanced to assistant professor of anatomy (1866–1868), and later adjunct professor and then, in 1875, professor of clinical surgery. On the resignation of Dr. Henry J. Bigelow in 1882 he attained the zenith of surgical preferment of New England—the full professorship of surgery in the Harvard Medical School—a position which he held up to his voluntary resignation in 1893, when he was made professor emeritus and received an honorary LL. D. from Harvard. In 1895 he resigned from active hospital work, but continued to serve as president of the hospital staff. He served the University on the Board of Overseers for twelve years (1896 to 1908). He performed his last surgical operation at the age of 72, but continued to care faithfully for his old patients until shortly before his death twelve years later.
Cheever's surgical work was planned with painstaking care and thoroughness and executed with skill and despatch. He united consummate familiarity with anatomy and reasonable skill in dissection with rare surgical sagacity. He himself says: "I never thought I excelled as an operator, but rather as a painstaker." He originated or revived many bold and unusual operations: displacement of the upper jaw for nasopharyngeal tumors, removal of tumors of the tonsil by external incision, pharyngotomy, esophagotomy for foreign bodies in the esophagus, the radical cure of hernia; he performed the first two consecutive successful ovariotomies in Boston, before the introduction of antisepsis. He was one of the first, if not the first, in this region, to do Cæsarean section. He published much but judiciously—monographs, case reports, hospital reports, essays. He was the valued correspondent of Oilier, of Lyons; he attracted the attention of Reginald Harrison, in England, especially by doing Cock's operation for impermeable stricture. Holmes, of St. George's Hospital, London, was interested in his excisions of the hip for coxalgia; Billroth, of Vienna compared notes with him in the surgery of the tonsil, and John Wood, of London, in the radical operation for hernia. Cheever's work was begun in the early days of ether anesthesia, before antisepsis and asepsis, in the face of suppuration and hospital gangrene, before the introduction of the clinical thermometer, the subcutaneous syringe, or the Roentgen ray. In his prime he worked under the carbolic spray and other early forms of antisepsis; the perfection of asepsis found him still vigorous and receptive to every improvement and innovation.
Cheever was an enthusiastic teacher of surgery, and thirty-three classes of students at the Harvard Medical School were his devoted disciples. At a period when the didactic lecture had not yet been relegated to an apologetic existence. Cheever's lectures in surgery were such models of brilliant condensation, lucidity, and system that they could not but be inspiring. He lectured extemporaneously
