Page:A cyclopedia of American medical biography vol. 1.djvu/143

 BACHE

BACKUS

Bache, Franklin (1792-1864).

A man who for thirty years ungrudg- ingly gives a great part of his time to aid in the preparation of a "Dispensatory" of the United States is worth noting for that alone, seeing the amount of drudgery and accuracy required can never be fully estimated.

The boy Franklin, son of Benjamin Franklin and Margaret Markoe Bache, was born in Philadelphia on the twenty- fifth of October, 1792, the great grandson of the Franklin, for his grandfather, Richard Bache, emigrating from Lanca- shire, England, in 1737, married Frank- lin's only daughter. At a school kept by a Dr. Samuel B. Wylie young Franklin had his early education, afterwards going to Pennsylvania University and graduat- ing B. A. there in 1810; M. D. in 1814. His accurate and very precise mind at- tracted him specially to chemistry, but the reception of a treatise written shortly after he left the army in 1813 was not encouraging. More successful was his wedding Aglae, daughter of one Jean Dabadie, a French merchant settled in Philadelphia, though she died seventeen years after leaving him with six children and just as the burden of a narrow in- come was somewhat lifted by her husband's appointment as professor of mi try in Jefferson College with an assured income from the "United States Dispensatory." When he became a fellow of the College of Physicans of Philadel- phia in 1829 he was appointed a reviser of the "United States Pharmacopoeia," Dr. Hewson and Dr. George B. Wood aiding him. "For all this expenditure of time, thought and labor, not only in this revision but in all those with which he had been concerned, he neither expected nor received any other recompense than the consciousness of duty performed and public benefit conferred." fn thi |

of 1864, just after finishing the revision, he was attacked by a disease, decidedly typhous, which carried him off on the nineteenth of March.

As a writer, during the ten years he co-edited the "North American and Surgical Journal;" he contributed many and valuable articles besides editing three important chemical works and writing largely for the "American Cy- clopedia of Medicine and Surgery," edited by Dr. Isaac Hays.

Besides the appointments named he was vice-president of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, member of the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sci- ences and two years president of the American Philosophical Society.

D. W.

Universities and their Sons, vol. ii., 1902,

Boston.

Biographical Memoir. Geo. B. Wood, M. D.,

Phila., 1865.

Backus, Frederick Fanning (1794-1S58).

Azel Backus, D. D., was a staunch old divine of Connecticut whose sternness was only equalled by his philanthropy, and his son Frederick Fanning, settling down as a general practitioner in Roches- ter, then numbering three hundred and thirty-one inhabitants was a chip of the old block and took the burden of woes physical, spiritual and civic on his own shoulders determined to make things better. He was born on the fifteenth of June, 1794, and graduated from Yale College at nineteen, taking his M. D. from the Medical College of New Haven in 1816, and two years later marrying "a lady of cultivated mind," one Rebecca, daughter of Col. William Fitzhugh of Maryland.

His chief merit lay in bis indefatigable efforts on behalf of the insane. His reports on their neglected condition laid the foundation for the Asylum at