Background
Arthur Bevan was born on August 9, 1861, in Chicago, Illinois, United States, to Thomas Bevan, a physician, and Sarah Elizabeth (Ramsey) Bevan, both originally from Ohio.
Arthur Bevan was born on August 9, 1861, in Chicago, Illinois, United States, to Thomas Bevan, a physician, and Sarah Elizabeth (Ramsey) Bevan, both originally from Ohio.
Bevan attended high school in Chicago, spent a year (1878 - 1879) at the Sheffield Scientific School of Yale University, and in 1883 received his M. D. degree from Rush Medical College in Chicago.
Bevan spent four years in the federal Marine Hospital Service, during the last year serving also as professor of anatomy at the University of Oregon Medical School in Portland. Bevan returned to Rush in 1887 as professor of anatomy and continued the affiliation for the rest of his professional life, becoming professor of surgical anatomy and associate professor of surgery in 1899 and professor and chairman of the department of surgery in 1902. After his retirement in 1934 he became a member of the board of trustees of Rush.
In addition to his teaching duties, Bevan carried on a successful private practice. He was a member of the surgical staff of the Presbyterian Hospital (1892 - 1943), serving as surgeon-in-chief, 1894-1934. In 1929 Bevan donated $1, 000, 000 to the hospital's expansion program. Bevan specialized in surgery of the stomach and tumors of the breast, and for a long time his name was associated with an operation for hydrocele of the testis.
Bevan contributed actively to the surgical literature and with his associate, Dean Lewis, who made the translation from the German, he edited Erich Lexer's famous textbook, which appeared as General Surgery (1908) and became widely known as "Lexer-Bevan. "
Although Bevan made no major contribution to the development of surgical science, he had an important influence on the course of medical education in the United States. He served as chairman of the American Medical Association's original committee on medical education in 1902, which two years later became the Council on Medical Education, with Bevan again as chairman, a position he held until 1916, and again from 1920 to 1928. The committee had been formed to deal with the problem of the large number of proprietary and other largely inadequate schools that were then allowed to grant the M. D. degree. Bevan's vigorous campaign to raise the level of medical education led directly to the far-reaching and influential report of Abraham Flexner on this subject, commissioned by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and published in 1910. This long-continued activity of Bevan's must be considered his most significant contribution.
Bevan was a founder and member of the first board of governors of the American College of Surgeons. During World War I he was director of surgery in the army surgeon general's office in Washington. Bevan died at the age of eighty-one, of acute myocardial failure, at his summer home in Lake Forest, Illinois, and was buried in Lake Forest Cemetery.
Arthur Bevan was a member of the Presbyterian Church.
Bevan served as president of the American Medical Association (1918-1919); the Chicago Medical Society (1898), the Inter-State Postgraduate Medical Association (1931), and the American Surgical Association (1932).
Bevan was a forceful, fearless man, hard driving, disdainful of personal attack and criticism.
On February 3, 1896, Arthur Bevan married Anna Laura Barber of Akron, Ohio. They had no children.