Some American medical botanists / Howard A. Kelly.

  • Howard Atwood Kelly
Date:
1911
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Some American medical botanists / Howard A. Kelly. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

    17/20 page 17
    precautions urged by Bigelow, who, with Ware and Flint, offered his services as investigator of the conditions in New Work. Bigelow at middle age was visiting physician to the Massachusetts General Hospital, professor of materia medica at Harvard, had an enormous consulting prac- tice, and wrote frequently for the press, and keenly worked for reform in the practice of medicine. It was one of his hobbies to dwell on the self-limited character of disease. In 1835, when he read an address with this title before the Massachusetts Medical Society the effect was immense. 0. W. Holmes says: ^^This remarkable essay had more influence on medical practice in America than any other similar brief treatise.^^ This paper is bound up in a'little volume entitled “Nature in Disease and Other Writings’’ (1854). His educational pamphlets caused wide-spread discus- sion at home and abroad. Lecky wrote a strong letter of dissent, but Lyell, Huxley and Spencer Avere vigorous in commendation. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, with its splendid curriculum and strong staff, is a monument, in part at least, to his untiring- energy. BigeloAV was still active in his cleclining years and became a most distinguished and approachable old-man oracle. He was blind nearly five years, and bedridden, but with mind undimmed at 93. “His religion, not for speech, discussion or profession, was that of a serious man living very near the realities of life!” Unforgotten to the end, though long inactive, he died January, 1879, and Avas buried in the beautiful Mount Aul)urn Ceme- tery Avhich he himself had originated (Mumford). Among the pupils Avho loved Caspar Wistar, and Avas ever a Avelcome guest at his house, Avas a Kentucky lad named Charles Short, son of Peyton Short, born in Surrey County, Virginia, in 1794. His biographer says that as a boy he Avas noted “for exemplary conduct and love of nature”; also in later life that he Avas “of medium lieight Avith blue eyes and an ample forehead and a smile radiant Avith goodness and beneficence.” I can touch noAV only on the botanical side of Short. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania AAdien 21 with a thesis on the “Medical Virtues of Juni- perus Sabina,” and turned his attention that same year to Avooing and Avedcling his stepsister, Jane Churchill. The young couple traA^eled home to Kentucky in a spring
    digitised image 1
    digitised image 2
    digitised image 3