Among the best-known neurologists and alienists of the century since Benjamin Rush wrote his Inquiries and Observations upon Diseases of the Mind (1812) was Dr. Isaac Ray, who, in 1838. published a work upon the medical jurisprudence of insanity.
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Dr. Brigham ( 1798-1849) was superintendent of the Utica Insane-asylum for some years before his death; and Dr. Kirkbride, who died in 1883, had been superintendent of the Philadelphia Asylum for over forty years. Dr. John P. Gray followed Brigham as superintendent of the Utica Asylum, where he remained for thirty-two years, and founded the Journal of Insanity.
The first independent writer upon diseases of the eye was Dr. Frick (1793-1870), of Maryland. As illustrating how little our present specialties were then separated, it is worth while to remark that Dr. Edward Delafield (1794-1875), who, in 1826. was Professor of Obstetrics and Diseases of Women and Children in the College of Physicians and Surgeons, New York, delivered at the same time a special course of lectures upon diseases of the eye. The first man in the United States to make these diseases his exclusive specialty was Dr. Williams (1822-1888), of Cincinnati.
It would be very wrong, in this connection, to omit the mention of the name of Oliver Wendell Holmes, the genial "Autocrat of the Breakfast Table," but recently dead at a ripe old age, who used to say that he was "seventy years young." who was for a long time Professor of Anatomy at Harvard Medical College, but who was much more widely known and endeared to the English-speaking public by his beautiful poems and most attractive prose writings.—who, as author of the Chambered Nautilus, for instance, will be remembered so long as the English language has a literature and is read, he rendered a great service to the medical profession by first calling attention to the contagiousness of puerperal fever. Of his prose writings, his medical essays—entitled Currents and Counter-currents—make perhaps the most delightful reading.
Not a few Americans deserve special mention as surgeons and surgical teachers of eminence during the past hundred years. Without being invidious, there must, nevertheless, be mentioned John Collins Warren (1778-1856), first Professor of Anatomy and Surgery in the Harvard School, under whose auspices ether was first administered for the purpose of surgical anæsthesia, and who was the founder, in 1828, of the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal. He wrote an extensive treatise upon tumors, and, it is stated, first successfully tapped the pericardium.
