ABSTRACT
A book reviewer named eighty-three-year-old Smith, “the Nestor of American Surgeons,” in 1906 and others increasingly applied the respectful title to him. The popular definition indicated one with elderly wisdom, but the reference to Homer’s classics also highlighted personal qualities that made Smith an effective social reformer. Mental illness and disability experts began to give up on treatment, turning to the preventive messages of eugenics. Smith tried to dissuade them with historical and scientific arguments emphasizing the new concepts of neuronal plasticity, but he was unable to forestall the rise of eugenics in the management of mental illness and disability. His friends, Joseph Bryant and Abraham Jacobi, honored him with a dinner gala celebrating his eighty-eighth birthday in February 1911; however, Smith colored his part of the evening with a series of outlandish medical tales that distracted his audience and the press from his accomplishments – much as Homer’s Nestor sometimes did.
