MEMOIR 
a 
* OF 
JOHN LIGHT ATLEE, M.D., LL.D 
[Extracted from the Transactions of the College of Physicians 
of Philadelphia, Third Series, Volume VIII.] MEMOIR 
OF 
JOHN LIGHT ATLEE, M.D., LL.D., 
FORMERLY ONE OF THE ASSOCIATE FELLOWS OF THE COLLEGE OF PHYSICIANS 
OF PHILADELPHIA; EX-PRESIDENT OF THE AMERICAN 
MEDICAL ASSOCIATION, ETC. 
Read Before the College, February 3, 1886, 
BY 
D. HAYES AGNEW, M.D., LL.D. 
[Extracted from the Transactions, Third Series, Volume VIII.] 
PHILADELPHIA: 
WM. J. DORN AN, PRINTER. 
1886. MEMOIR 
OF 
JOHN LIGHT ATLEE, M.D., LL.D. 
On the fifth day of October, 1885, might have been seen one of 
the most notable gatherings that had ever taken place in the city 
of Lancaster. This assemblage embraced members of the learned 
professions and citizens of every rank and condition of life. All 
gathered together in order to participate in the last sad rites of 
burial to one of their most distinguished townsmen-Dr. John 
Light Atlee. And how preeminently fitting this pageant of love 
and respect! Here was a man who had seen portions of four gen- 
erations of his fellows come upon the stage of life, play their varied 
parts in the great drama of humanity, and then silently pass out of 
sight. Here was a man who had participated more or less actively 
m all the chief and moving questions of beneficence, education, and 
government which belong to the body politic of a populous city. 
Here was a man who had been admitted for an exceptionally long 
period of time, in the exercise of professional duties, into the inner- 
most sanctities of a vast number of households. Ever a conspicuous 
figure among his fellow-men, known to every dweller in the city of 4 
AGNEW, 
his birth, no wonder that his mortal remains should command such 
reverent respect before being committed to their kindred dust. 
Dr. John Light Atlee was of English origin, and came of a long 
line of distinguished antecedents, dating their lineage back in an 
unbroken line anterior to the time of Charles II., and most of whom 
had filled places of great responsibility and honor. His great 
grandfather, William Atlee, of Fordhook House,1 England, in the 
parish of Acton, came to this country in 1733, as private secretary 
to Lord Howe, at the time the lattei' entered upon his duties as 
Governor of Barbadoes. William Atlee's wife was the daughter of 
an English clergyman and a cousin of William Pitt. The grand- 
father of Dr. Atlee, William Augustus Atlee, first son of William 
and Jane Atlee, was born in Philadelphia. He studied law in the 
office of Judge Shippen, was admitted to the Lancaster bar, rose to 
eminence, and in 1777 became First Associate Judge of the Supreme 
Court of Pennsylvania. He was an ardent and patriotic supporter 
of the Colonial cause, and after the establishment of our indepen- 
dence was appointed President Judge of the First District Court, 
which embraced in its jurisdiction the counties of Chester, Lancaster, 
York, and Dauphin; and while still in the exercise of his judicial 
functions fell a victim to yellow fever. William Pitt Atlee, son of 
Judge Atlee and Esther Sayre, married a daughter of Major John 
Light, and of the six children resulting from this union, the subject 
of the present sketch, Dr. John Light Atlee, was the eldest. He 
was born November 2, 1799, in the city of Lancaster. His academic 
education was received at the academy of Gray and Wiley, a school 
for a long time famous in the city of Philadelphia, both for its 
thorough curriculum of instruction and the strictness of its dis- 
cipline. Dr. Atlee's medical education, hastened by the early death 
1 In a drawing-room, in the more modern portion of this family homestead, 
wainscoted in oak in the year 1500 by one William Atlee, Ada, the daughter 
of Lord Byron, whose wife then resided there, was married to Lord King. MEMOIR OF DR. JOHN LIGHT ATLEE. 
5 
of his father, began in 1815, in the office of Dr. Samuel Hulmes, 
of Lancaster. In 1817 he entered the medical department of the 
University of Pennsylvania, from which institution he received 
the degree of Doctor of Medicine in 1820. After graduation, Dr. 
Atlee returned to the city of his birth and there commenced the 
practice of his profession. Two years later, March 22, 1822, he 
married Sarah H. Franklin, daughter of the Honorable Walter 
Franklin, a distinguished jurist, and for a long time President Judge 
of the courts of Lancaster and York Counties. Mrs. Atlee was a 
woman of great nobility and force of character, and adorned every 
relation of life with a rare grace and dignity of manner, until called 
away by the hand of death fifty-eight years after her marriage. 
The children who survive these parents are Dr. Walter F. Atlee, of 
Philadelphia, the well-known surgeon and honored Fellow of the 
College of Physicians, William Augustus Atlee, a prominent member 
of the Lancaster bar, and Miss Anne Franklin Atlee, whose long 
and untiring devotion to her parents entitles her to King Lemuel's 
commendation, " Many daughters have done virtuously, but thou 
excellest them all." A third son, Dr. John L. Atlee, Jr., a physi- 
cian greatly endeared to all who knew him, died in the early years 
of his manhood. 
From the time of his graduation, in 1820, until within a few days 
of his death, Dr. Atlee was actively engaged in the duties of his 
profession. A few months before his demise he had an attack of 
facial paralysis, induced, it is believed, by indiscreet exposure. This 
was the signal for a halt. Up to this time, the multiplying years 
had dealt so generously with the man that he seemed to possess a 
spring of perpetual youth. His tall, erect, agile figure, his quick, 
elastic step and sunny face betokened no abatement of bodily force. 
His mind never for a moment experienced even a partial eclipse, but 
continued to act with its wonted energy, and in a short time, despite 
a moderate physical disability, he was again engaged in professional 6 
AGNEW, 
work. The final summons came in the form of an attack of pneu- 
monia, and on the afternoon of October 1, 1885, the gentle spirit of 
Dr. Atlee left the clay tenement which it had worn and animated, 
for well nigh eighty-six years, for another and a better world. 
In the contemplation of a life like that of the subject of the 
present sketch, it may be viewed from three distinct points of 
observation, as a citizen, as a physician, and as a man, for we find 
three distinct sides to his character. While it is true that the 
professional man must ever be loyal to his calling, yet the common, 
public interests of the community in which he lives, and of which 
he is an integral part, cannot be ignored. There are men who 
possess that singular flexibility and versatility of the mental consti- 
tution which enables them to project their personality into many 
and diverse lines of benevolence or education, becoming in each a 
recognized force, and yet at the same time carry along all the routine 
of their own professional work with scrupulous exactitude. Such 
men, however, are insular. Dr. Atlee was one of that select and 
unique class. When the effort was made to introduce the system of 
general or free school education which had been created by our 
State Legislature in 1838, it was met by a formidable opposition, 
especially among the Germans, who formed a large element of the 
population in Lancaster County. These people still clung to that 
school system which existed under the Act of 1820. When the 
time arrived for the substitution of the new method of instruction 
for the old, Dr. Atlee appears as the public man, and it was largely 
through his personal influence and individual efforts with the people 
among whom he lived, that their prejudices were overcome, and the 
system of free schools successfully inaugurated. Nor did his interest 
in this great scheme of education cease with its establishment. He 
became the chairman of the superintending committee, and for forty 
years acted as a director of the School Board of the county. In 
founding the Normal School at Millersville, he exhibited the same MEMOIR OF DR. JOHN LIGHT ATLEE. 
7 
untiring zeal. The resolutions of the School Board of Lancaster 
City, passed after his death, fully attest the value of his services in 
the cause of education. Again, as a trustee, no one was more active 
in the organization of Franklin and Marshall College, in which 
institution he was chosen Professor of Anatomy and Physiology, and 
from which he received the degree of Doctor of Laws. 
Possessing a rare faculty for management, his aid was sought in 
other fields than those of education. He was one of the managers 
of the House of Refuge in this city; he was appointed a trustee in 
the Bishop Bowman Church Home, in Lancaster, acted as president 
of the Board of Trustees of the Home for Friendless Children, and 
held the same position in the Board of Managers for the State 
Lunatic Asylum at Harrisburg. 
In turning now to the medical career of Dr. Atlee, we find in him 
a remarkable and harmonious combination of all those qualities 
which go to make up a good and great physician. He was a life- 
long student, a close observer, bold and self-reliant without being 
rash, honorable in professional intercourse, the implacable foe to all 
forms of charlatanry, or doubtful methods, whether in or out of the 
profession, and withal possessed a sweet, gentle disposition, combined 
with a cheerful and dignified deportment, eminently calculated to 
inspire confidence and hope in the sick, and to command respect 
among his medical brethren. Ever .active in all that concerned the 
interest and advancement of medicine he was among those who, very 
early in the history of medical organizations, discerned the impor- 
tance of centralizing professional power, not only as a scientific 
measure, but as calculated to establish a kindly reciprocity of feeling 
among physicians, and thereby elevate medicine in the public estima- 
tion. Accordingly, we find Dr. Atlee a leading force in founding the 
Lancaster County Medical Society in 1844, over which body he twice 
presided as its president. He was one of those also who, in 1848, 
were prominent in the organization of the State Medical Society, 8 
AGNEW, 
and in 1857 was honored by being chosen the presiding officer of 
that body. When the scheme to organize a national representative 
body of physicians (the American Medical Association) was con- 
ceived, in 1847, we find Dr. Atlee's name among its founders. In 
1868 he was elected vice-president, and in 1882 president of this 
organization. In 1877, in recognition of his high professional 
reputation in the department of abdominal and pelvic surgery of the 
female, Dr. Atlee was elected an honorary member of the Gyneco- 
logical Society of Boston. He was also an Associate Fellow of the 
College of Physicians of Philadelphia. 
The most noteworthy event, however, which towTers conspicuously 
above others in the surgical career of Dr. Atlee, was the revival of 
the operation of ovariotomy. As new discoveries, or methods of 
managing disease, become established and made common property, 
we soon forget or underestimate the merits of the originator. 
The man, for example, who, without a single precedent to illumi- 
nate the path of experiment except his own singular faith, pressed 
ether to the stage of profound anesthesia, must have been animated 
by nothing short of a God-given courage, and though no monument 
of brass or of marble records the name of Morton or Wells, yet 
until the end of time humanity will be their debtors. And so with 
regard to ovariotomy. When Dr. Atlee conceived the idea of 
reviving this operation (in 1843), there was nothing to lighten his 
path, save the cases of McDowell, dating back to 1809, and these 
almost forgotten; on the contrary, there was everything to intimi- 
date and discourage one less bold. Men occupying the highest 
positions in the profession as writers and teachers, on both sides of 
the Atlantic, men who had for years moulded medical and surgical 
thought like plastic clay, had spoken their condemnation of the 
procedure, some of them in no charitable terms; yet, this man with 
a dauntless courage, the offspring of inborn convictions, steps forward 
out of the rank and file of imperious authority, assumes the respon- 9 
MEMOIR OF DR. JOHN LIGHT ATLEE. 
sibility of being singular and antagonistic, and inaugurates anew an 
operation which every succeeding year delivers an army of women 
from death and lays the world under tribute to his genius. Nor do 
the far-reaching results of this surgical venture terminate with 
ovariotomy, it was the germinal promise of all that rich harvest of 
abdominal surgery which has marked the progress of our art in these 
later years. Indeed so wonderfully articulated and dependent are the 
outgrowths of these seminal thoughts, that it is impossible to predict 
what avenues of surgical venture are yet to be opened. They are 
like some of those divine epigrams, "Who is my brother?" "No 
man liveth to himself," "No man dieth to himself," the profound 
depths of application of which have never yet been plumbed by the 
measuring instruments of man. Ah, yes, in the magnitude and 
resistless sweep of the river we too often forget the spring-heads, 
the sources of its strength and power! To America belongs the 
honor of that great boon which renders painless the knife of the 
surgeon and the throes of maternity; to America belongs the seed- 
thought of subcutaneous osteotomy, and to America belongs the 
glory of ovariotomy. 
No man perhaps has more successfully filled the various depart- 
ments of medicine than Dr. Atlee. Almost half a century of his 
professional career was lived before the specialties of medicine had 
attained any very marked public recognition. In over two thousand 
operations of which he has left us a record are embraced every 
manner of surgical procedure, covering every branch of the now 
specialized surgery, and these followed by a success which compares 
not unfavorably with the leading operators of the world. 
On the 23d of January, 1822, he operated for fistula in ano, and 
on the 9th of September, 1885, he performed tracheotomy. These 
operations were almost sixty-four years apart. Six times in his 
eighty-third year, and three times in his eighty-fourth year, he 
made the operation of ovariotomy. The cunning had not left his 
hand, nor had a shadow crept across his mind. What an immense 10 
AGNEW, 
well-spring of vitality must have been that, which could so continue 
to energize the evening life of this man-quando ullum invenient 
parem ? 
As an obstetrician his experience, under the circumstances of 
locality, was exceptional, having attended three thousand women 
in childbirth, and as a practitioner of medicine he enjoyed an 
extended and unrivalled domain of patronage. It was this great 
wealth of experience gleaned from so wide a field of medicine, 
that commanded the confidence of his' professional brethren, who, 
from all parts of the land, sought his counsel and aid. 
There is something after all, besides grace of manner, force of 
intellect, and public spirit, which is necessary to round out character 
to its full and just proportions, and that is a conscious sense of 
moral responsibility. It has been said that the physician, constantly 
absorbed with the phenomena which largely concern the physical 
nature of man, is prone to forget the ego, the spiritual, inde- 
structible essence which survives decay, and for which the body 
is only a convenient environment during the probationary period 
of existence. I cannot believe that, in any general sense, the 
charge of materialism can be justly made against our profession; 
or that medical men, who, as a class, have enjoyed the benefits 
of a liberal education, and therefore, it may be assumed, have 
some knowledge of the higher domain of philosophy, can believe 
that either this body instinct with deity and law, or the principle 
of consciousness and thought which inhabits it, when the nexus 
is dissolved, sinks into a gulf of annihilation. Be this as it 
may, Doctor Atlee, with all his devotion to the study of the 
human body and its diseases, ever maintained that mental equi- 
poise which moored him to the great verities of the future, and 
left no place in his mind or heart for the shallow vagaries which 
ever and anon rise on the sea of speculative thought. Very 
early in life he connected himself with the Episcopal body of 
Christians, was for forty years a senior warden in that church, MEMOIR OF DR. JOHN LIGHT ATLEE. 
11 
attending with uniform regularity her ecclesiastical courts, and 
always taking an active interest in all the philanthropic activities 
of this religious organization. Singularly pure and exemplary 
both in his private and public life, there was yet nothing of 
austerity in his demeanor. A man of great simplicity and hon- 
esty of character, he hated shams. On one occasion when asked 
by a clergyman of his church, who, on a preceding Sabbath had 
performed the service in an assumed affectation of voice, how 
he liked the intonation, the Doctor replied with considerable feel- 
ing, "if there is any time in this world, sir, when a man ought to 
be natural it is when he is addressing the Supreme Being." 
It is said, I think, by Macaulay, that no power is more formidable 
than that of being able to make men ridiculous. When a man 
ahead of his day, like Fulton, like Jenner, like Pare, after announc- 
ing some fact out of the common experience, has been made the 
mark for taunt and ridicule, and when time, that great adjudicator 
and vindicator of the real and the true, places that fact beyond 
the region of controversy, how great is the temptation to retaliate, 
and yet after ovariotomy by the common consensus of the medical 
world became an established operation, no man ever heard Dr. 
Atlee say one unkind word toward, or use his commanding vantage- 
ground to cover with confusion his detractors. Sixty-five years 
of public, life, as physician, citizen, and Christian gentleman, and 
in each of these spheres blameless; what a royal legacy to leave 
behind! " A good name is rather to be chosen than great riches, 
and loving favor rather than silver or gold." There is a philosophy 
which asks in tones of horrid despair, "Is life worth living?" a 
philosophy the monuments of which are countless suicides and 
unhonored graves. Here was a life that was worth living, and 
the hand of love could write no more appropriate epitaph than 
those simple words which are reverently inscribed on the grave- 
stone of our distinguished and beloved associate, " Pertransivit 
Benefaciendo."