John Chalmers DaCosta

To the Editor: —The "Reflections on John Chalmers DaCosta" by Dr. Benjamin Lipshutz, of Philadelphia ( JAMA 181 : adv p 218 [Aug 18] 1962), is fascinating and most interesting, and I would like to add a personal observation. When I was a medical student in 1920, Dr. Wilburn Smith (FRCS, Edinburgh) was one of our clinical professors of surgery. He had been one of Dr. DaCosta's students and was a Rhodes scholar. He, himself, was not only a very fine surgeon and also a remarkably fine lecturer, he was a great admirer of his former teacher, as well. He told us the following story: One day DaCosta took a group of his "boys" to the bedside for their visual inspection of a greatly emaciated man with a markedly distended abdomen. They were not permitted to touch the patient or ask him any questions. DaCosta's purpose was to instruct them in the