(Augustus Charles Bernays) spent considerable time in the college gymnasium, and took part in some of the public exhibitions given there. He was fond of outdoor sports, and joined the first base ball club organized at McKendree College. When Bernays received the degree of Bachelor of Arts on June 13, 1872, he lacked four months of being eighteen years old. He was the youngest member of his class and one of the youngest graduates in the history of McKendree College.
-from Augustus Charles Bernays by Thekla Bernays
McKendree College (which is now known as McKendree University) is located in Lebanon, Illinois and is about fifteen or twenty miles east of St. Louis. Established in 1828 as a Methodist seminary, it is the oldest college in Illinois.
According to Connie Nisinger, Bernays was one of "the nation's most eminent surgeons of his time...(and was) famous as a contributor to the literature of anatomy and surgery...Dr. Bernays performed the first successful Caesarian section in St. Louis in 1889. He went on to perform the first successful coeliotomy (organ or body cavity surgery) and the first successful gallstone operations in Missouri. Bernays was made Professor of Anatomy in the College of Physicians and Surgeons of St. Louis before the age of 29." He was certainly an interesting guy and his biography has a bunch of entertaining stories about life in the St. Louis area during the antebellum era.
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