Extract
He was a surgeon whose credo was not to ponder, rationalize, or theorize
about the solution of a surgical problem but to do the experiment.
Nor was his inquiring mind limited to orthopaedic surgery or even to the
entire field of surgery and medicine. It led him to conduct experiments on the
temperature of fish and its effect on the clotting time of their blood, to
investigate their organs of hearing, and to study the source of electricity in
rays, the air sacs of birds, the behavioral instincts of birds and bees, the
development of fossil bones, and the clockwise and counterclockwise rotation
of vines.