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His amazing surgical dexterity spread his name all over the world, and lesser men seated in the operating theatre would gasp in admiration as Dr. Kelly, a scalpel in each hand, would boldly slash left & right through a patient's muscular abdominal wall. Dr. Cullen often tells the story of their first meeting, in Toronto's General Hospital in 1891. Young Tom Cullen was the intern assigned to handle the great Dr. Kelly's instruments. As Dr. Kelly grasped his scalpels Dr. Cullen turned round to thread a needle. When he looked back in a few seconds he was astonished to find the patient's abdomen open. Most surgeons at the General took ten minutes for this procedure.
Today, short stocky Dr. Kelly, with his fuzzy head, broad white mustache and scarred cheeks (he was treated with radium for cancer of the face), is a familiar figure on Baltimore streets. In his lapel he wears a pink rose, sent fresh by an admiring friend four times a week. Below the rose is a large blue campaign button bearing a red question mark. As he meets his friends Dr. Kelly presents them with small reprints from the New Testament, saying, "Here's my card," and when strangers question him about his interrogating button, he invariably asks: "What is the most important thing in the world?" The correct answer: Christianity.
Dr. Kelly approved of Billy Sunday, was a friend of famed Evangelist Dwight Lyman Moody, engaged in frequent religious skirmishes with his fellow townsman, Unbeliever Henry Louis Mencken. For many years he crusaded against liquor, prostitution, Sunday movies, gambling, birth control.
In his 80 years Dr. Kelly has mastered enough hobbies to satisfy half-a-dozen ordinary men. His enormous library contains large sections on Africa, astronomy, bird life, reptiles, fungi, biography and geology. Books litter all his rooms, and jammed in every corner of Dr. Kelly's house are snakeskins, turtle shells, stuffed birds, a duck-billed platypus, buffalo legs. Up to a few years ago Dr. Kelly kept a zoo of 20-odd live snakes in a chamber.
Early in the century Dr. Kelly was impressed by the Curies' radium discoveries, and in 1904 he bought a supply of radium, cured a woman of cancer. Eager to develop domestic sources of radium, he studied mining, learned that radium could be obtained from carnotite, developed a reduction plant at Denver to make domestic radium available. Dr. Kelly's interest in domestic radium, says Dr. Cullen jokingly, began when he lost $80,000 in a Mexican silver mine. At present he is estimated to have the largest private radium supply in the world.
Greatest of all Dr. Kelly's joys is the career of his son Edmund Bredow, who teaches gynecology at the Hopkins. Only real son bequeathed the Hopkins by any of its four founders, he carries with him his father's tales of golden days and keeps green the memory of Howard Kelly's glorious surgical exploits.
*Fast fading now is the aquiline countenance of William Stewart Halsted. Gossips say Sargent never liked him, purposely painted his face in thin, perishable oils.