Page:A cyclopedia of American medical biography vol. 1.djvu/293

 CLAIBORNE

CLARK

10, 1S28, in Brunswick County, Virginia, and educated in local academies and at Randolph-Macon College, graduating A. B. in 1848, and receiving his M. A. in 1851. He entered the University of Virginia in 184S and graduated in medi- cine in 1S49, then attended lectures at the Jefferson Medical College, Philadelphia, and took his M. D. from that school in 1850.

He was a member of the Gynecological Society of Boston; a fellow-elect of the Victoria Institute of Great Britain; and was one of the founders of the Medical Society of Virginia and its president in 1878. He was also a member of the Southern Surgical and Gynecological Association and of the Tri-State Medical Association of the Carolinas and Virginia.

He settled in and began to practise in Petersburg, January 1, 1851. In 1855 he was elected to the lower house of the State Legislature, and in 1S57 was elected a state senator, and served in that body until the beginning of the Civil War, when he was eventually commissioned major and surgeon, and assigned to duty with the twelfth Virginia Infantry. In May, 18G1, while in the field, he was elected to the senate, and on December 1, 1861, was ordered by the secretary of war to take his seat. This he did, but immediately resigned and was given the duty of organizing and equipping general hospi- tals, chiefly in Petersburg, Virginia. In June, 1864, being the senior surgeon of the post, he was appointed executive officer and chief surgeon of all the military hospitals in Petersburg and vicinity.

He was a very able man. Not only was he a most skillful physician, but a man of broad general information and experience.

lie: married Sarah J. Alston, of North Carolina, in May, 1853, and had four daughters and a son, John H. Claiborne, Jr., who became a physician and practised in New York City as an oculist. In November, 18S3, he married his second wife, Anne L. Watson, of Virginia, and had one son and a daughter. After a sudden illness of a few days'

duration, he died on February 24, 1905, in Petersburg.

He made some valuable contributions to medical literature, and besides pub- lished an interesting and valuable book of reminiscences entitled "Seventy-five Years in Old Virginia." A valuable pub- lication of his of a professional character is " Reports from Private Practice." The following are some of his journal articles:

"Azoturia." ("Virginia Medical Jour- nal," vol. ii.)

"Camphor as an Antidote to Strych- nia." (Ibid., vol. iv.)

"Puerpural Hemorrhagica." ("Vir- ginia Medical Monthly," vol. v.)

"Clinical Reports of Skin Diseases." (Ibid., vol. v.)

"Typho-malarial Fever." (Ibid., vol. vi.)

" Incipient Phthisis and its Treatment." (Ibid., vol. viii.)

"The Place of Electricity in General Practice." ("Transactions of Medical Society of Virginia," 1S93.)

R. M. S.

Physicians and Surgeons of America, Irving A. Watson.

Clark, Alonzo (1807-1887).

Two little incidents give the key to the character of this original thinker who had an inward assurance of his own powers. His father, not rich, offered him $1,000 to complete his education, and the lad said he would work his own way through. When growing old he was asked to retain the presidency of the College of Physicians and Surgeons, New York, but firmly de- clined, showing the same resolution in leaving off as in beginning. The father who offered his savings was one Spencer Clark, a leather merchant of Chester, which village he had founded and where Alonzo was born March 1, 1807. The boy got his education at the village school in Worthington; the Hopkins Academy at Badley, and under Parson Hallock of Plainfield, finally taking his bachelor's degree in 1828 from William's College, Massachusetts. The discipline of teach- ing school fell to his lot as to that of