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BEXAR
HISTORY
Continued from page 19
March 19, 1840, there was an Indian raid on San Antonio and Dr.
Weidermann took an active part in the fight and killed two Indian
warriors. He approached a friend’s house to borrow a cart to take the
two bodies home. He explained that he needed actual skeletons to
continue his studies and research. That night at his home he stewed
the bodies in a soap boiler, and when the flesh was completely sep-
arated he emptied the pot into the acequia. This stream furnished
the freshwater supply to the community for drinking, whereas the
San Antonio River was used primarily for washing and bathing.
There was a city ordinance to the effect that the acequia should not
be contaminated under any circumstances and if violated would be
coupled with a heavy fine.
Dr. Weidermann now had his skeletons to study, but this was not
considered appropriate by the townspeople; they were horrified to
learn of the event, believing that the water of the acequia had been
defiled by the doctor, and they were drinking particles of Indian in
the fluid. In great indignation, a mob formed and had the doctor
arrested, and he was brought to trial. He assured the judge and jury
that the rapid-flowing acequia would have washed all the particles
during the night into the river and people were not drinking “Indian
soup.” Convinced for the most part, the court let the doctor off with
a heavy fine, assuring him that if it were not for his previous good
record he would have been run out of town at gunpoint!
Dr. George Cupples was born in Scotland in 1815 and took his
medical training at the University of Paris. He was persuaded to
move to Texas after meeting Dr. Ashbel Smith, who was representing
the Republic of Texas in the French court at that time. Dr. Cupples
arrived in the San Antonio area in 1846 and opened a practice in
Castroville. He moved to San Antonio in 1850, at which time the
population of San Antonio was 1,000, of which 90 percent were of
Mexican descent. When he opened his practice, he was either the
second or third physician in San Antonio. During the Mexican war
in 1846, he served as surgeon with the Texas Rangers. During the
Civil War, he served as a surgeon to the 7th Texas Cavalry.
Dr. Cupples helped to establish the Bexar Medical Society and was
its first president in 1853. He was also instrumental in establishing
the Texas State Medical Association at its organizational meeting in
1853 and he became its president in 1853. He returned to San An-
tonio after the Civil War to resume his surgical practice. This was a
time of notable advances and changes in medicine and surgery, and
Dr. Cupples participated in many of these events. He was the first
surgeon in Texas to use a general anesthetic and this was in a case of
an amputation of a leg. He was noted for performing several proce-
20 San Antonio Medicine • January 2016
dures for the first
time in Texas. In
addition to using
ether and chloro-
form for the first
time, he was the
first in America
to resect the
tongue for cancer.
He performed
the first resection
of an ovarian
tumor in a child Dr. George Cupples, first BCMS President in 1853.
age 6. He was the
first surgeon in Texas to employ the Freund’s procedure for removal
of the uterus and ovaries, and he was the first to amputate an ex-
tremity at the hip joint and also at a knee joint successfully. It is no-
table that these various procedures were performed without the
benefit of a hospital being available. Also of note is that antiseptic
surgery was not practiced in America until the end of the 19th cen-
tury. However, Dr. Cupples describes scrubbing and cleansing of the
operative sites during the above procedures.
He helped establish a committee on surgery of the Texas Medical
Association in 1885. He was chairman of the six-man committee
that sent out 6,000 questionnaires to the physicians of Texas asking
for information on the surgeries that had been performed with ex-
tensive detail and information about the patient and the procedure.
Multiple aspects of the surgeries performed were requested and 138
surgeons responded. Dr. Cupples’ summary, a 74-page report, covers
4,293 operations, and the report was exhibited at the meeting of the
Association in 1886. Included was the type of operation, mortality,
anesthetics, vital statistics, and if antiseptics were employed and their
effects and consequences. Most of the operations were not performed
in hospitals but in the office, the patient’s home, or out in the open
for better light. Chloroform was chosen over ether 35 to 1. Carbolic
acid was practically the only antiseptic. Mortality was from 10 per-
cent to 100 percent depending on the type of surgery. For all the
major operations (2,080), the overall mortality was 16 percent. A re-
view of the report was noted in the Journal of the AMA and in the
British Medical Journal. It should be noted that in the report is the
following quote by Dr. Cupples: “If the whole truth must be told,
the writer of this report remembers to have read in the London
Lancet some years ago, ‘What good (professionally, that is) can come