Frederic S. Dennis

Samuel Sheppard [sic: Shepard] Dennis was known to the business world as president of a New Jersey savings bank and director in various corporations. The Century knew him, in his occasional visits, for his cheerful outlook on men and things and his hobby of autograph-collection. Dennis used to say that the way to establish a successful collection of the kind was to make a respectable beginning and then let your acquaintances see what you had; it would then grow of itself. Two specimens which he particularly wanted came to him from a visitor, who looked over Dennis’s collection and then remarked casually: “If you care about it, I can give you two autograph letters, from Bismarck and from Edward VII, which are knocking around my desk and which I should be glad to get rid of.”

Alexander Dana Noyes
1925 Century Association Yearbook

In the development of antiseptic surgery, Frederic Shepard Dennis occupied for the United States the place of high distinction held by Lister in England and Pasteur in France. Dr. Dennis worked with both of these celebrated surgeons at their operating tables; as far back as 1877, he was challenging in America the surgical methods of the past. The present generation hardly knows from what humanity was delivered by the new discoveries. Mortality in surgical cases had in some countries risen to eighty per cent; even Bellevue Hospital, it has been recalled, “although it was among the best of its kind,” was at that time “replete with failure and misery; its wards redolent with the atmosphere of sepsis, the neighborhood reeking with ill-savor.” Dennis obtained the aid of Andrew Carnegie to introduce the new antiseptic practice in a well-equipped pathological laboratory at Bellevue, and the great reform was achieved.

Dr. Dennis was for this country the real inventor of the nowadays indispensable system of teaching surgery by clinics. In his thirty-three consecutive years of surgical instruction he was a clear, concise and forceful teacher, from whose classes went out some of the most useful of our surgeons. Aside from all professional activities, he was a kind, encouraging and helpful friend, a hearty participant in social intercourse, a good botanist and a breeder of fine horses. It is a pleasant picture.

Alexander Dana Noyes
1935 Century Association Yearbook