A bronze statue of him was cast by Alexander Stirling Calder and erected on the National Mall, but moved in 1970 to Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia.

[1] At 19, Gross returned to Swift's office, where he learned mineralogy, anatomy, surgery, Materia Medica, therapeutics, physiology, obstetrics, and French.

He married a twenty-year-old widow with one child, and soon moved back to Easton, where the cost of living was lower and there were greater opportunities for young physicians.

He also became interested in research on blood coagulation, gastric and renal excretion, animal inoculation of smallpox, and pulmonary pathology following strangulation.

Soon after his arrival, in 1841 Gross set up a dog laboratory in the basement of the college building, which was then only two years old and described "as for beauty and convenience not surpassed by any similar edifice on the continent."

$30,000 had been spent on the structure and $20,000 for the purchase of books, chemical apparatus and anatomical preparations in Europe by Dr. Joshua Flint, Gross' predecessor as Professor of Surgery.

Gross also entered into private practice, which he conducted at St. Joseph Hospital, opened 20 November 1836 as St. Vincent's Infirmary and housed in an eponymous orphanage on Jefferson Street.

He and his family were close friends with the Crittendens, Breckenridges, Wooleys, Prestons, Wickliffes, Pirtles, Ballards, Rowans, Guthries, and Prentices.

[2] In August 1855, Gross, a close friend of John Barbee, the Mayor of Louisville, helped save the Catholic Cathedral on Fifth Street from an anti-foreign Know-Nothing Party mob that intended to burn it down in what was known as the Bloody Monday riot.

In Philadelphia Gross became one of the most prominent members of several medical organizations as physicians in the United States increasingly sought to professionalize their vocation.

In 1875 Gross returned to Louisville for a meeting of the AMA, where he was re-elected president and entertained lavishly, even being presented by the physicians of Kentucky with two thoroughbred horses.

He made his final visit to Kentucky two years later, in 1877, when he gave a memorial oration in honor of the famous surgeon Ephraim McDowell in Danville.

Gross was not convinced of the efficacy of antisepsis, despite the recent work of Joseph Lister and Louis Pasteur demonstrating the germ theory to explain infections.

Gross is quoted as saying: "Little if any faith is placed by any enlightened or experienced surgeon on this side of the Atlantic in the so-called carbolic acid treatment of Professor Lister".

[7] In Louisville a portrait of him hangs in the Fred Rankin Amphitheater, and since 1941, the Phi Delta Epsilon Medical Fraternity has sponsored an annual Samuel D. Gross lectureship.

After Gross moved to Cincinnati, he ceased his translation work and began to publish original contributions to the scientific field.

In 1839, Gross published Elements of Pathological Anatomy, the first systematic treatise on the subject in the United States; its two volumes were lavishly illustrated with woodcuts and colored engravings.

Early in the nineteenth century McDowell had removed a urinary stone from a young James K. Polk, and distinguished himself as one of the most capable surgeons in America and the originator of abdominal surgery, as well as being the first ovariotomist.