Volume 2

History of medicine in New York : three centuries of medical progress / by James J. Walsh.

  • Walsh, James J. (James Joseph), 1865-1942.
Date:
1919
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: History of medicine in New York : three centuries of medical progress / by James J. Walsh. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    29/366 (page 343)
    Dr. Draper had the misfortune to live just before the great flood of knowledge with regard to the Middle Ages began to be poured into modern thought. Living at a time when our own architecture wras at a very low ebb, when, as the historian of hospitals has said, our hospitals were like jails, and when our surgery was extremely limited, it was very hard for him to appre¬ ciate the magnificent accomplishments of what had been called “the Dark Ages.” We were in the midst of our own Dark Ages, and the significance of the older time was eclipsed by that fact. The development of the history of surgery, of hospitals, of architecture, and of education, has given a very different background for judg¬ ment as to the course of the intellectual development of Europe. There is a period of several centuries before our time when an unfortunate decadence in human intellectual achievement, very hard to explain, took place. Judged from the standpoint of the knowledge of his time, Draper made a magnificent synthesis as a background for the philosophy of history. Hence the enthusiastic welcome accorded his books both in this country and in Europe, so that as regards serious books, at least, he was one of the first Ameri¬ can writers to contradict Sydney Smith’s famous question, “Who anywhere reads an American book?” A physician whose writings apart from his professional work have probably been of greater help to general historians of New York than most others of his time, was Dr. John W. Francis, Pro¬ fessor of the Institutes of Medicine and of Forensic Medicine, as well as later of Obstetrics, of the College of Physicians. He occu¬ pied the same chairs at Rutgers Medical College, New York City, after the resignation of the faculty of the College of Physicians and Surgeons led to the organization of that institution. His “Old New York, or Reminiscences of the Past Sixty Years,” is well known and frequently referred to for details of the intellectual and artistic life of the New York of his time. This was an en¬ larged and revised edition of the “Anniversary Discourse” de¬ livered before the New York Historical Society, November 17th, 1857. In the preface to this, Dr. Francis notes with regret that New York has been particularly unfortunate in not having writers who cared to devote themselves to preserving historical details of the city’s life. He was among the first to call emphatic attention to the fact that owing to the interest of New England writers in their