Page:A cyclopedia of American medical biography vol. 1.djvu/308

 COMEGYS

COMEGYS

Jefferson Medical School in Philadelphia, where he took an M. D. in 1851.

He next served for three years in Blockley Hospital, and returned to Virginia, inlS54, and settled in Richmond. Soon afterwards he was elected lecturer on clinical medicine in the Blockley Hospital Medical Institution, but declined the position. He practised in Richmond until the beginning of the Civil War, then entered the service of the confeder- acy as surgeon of the twenty-first Virginia Regiment, and upon the organ- ization of the famous "Stonewall Bri- gade," was appointed its surgeon-in-chief After the war he returned to Richmond and resumed practice, and upon the re- organization of the Medical College of Virginia, was elected professor of ob- stetrics, a position he held until his death. He was a charter member of the Medi- cal Society of Virginia and a member of the Richmond Academy of Medicine.

His army record was excellent, and at one time he is said to have been the highest ranking officer in the medical corps of the confederacy.

He married a Miss Irvine and had a son and a daughter. The son, Burbage Coleman, was a physician, but died of consumption early in his career, and the father died in Richmond after an illness (chronic nephritis) which confined him to the house for several months, on March 4, 1SS4. He made few contributions to medical literature. So far as we can find the following are the only articles:

"Management of Labor in Presenta- tions of Head and Hand." (" Virginia Clinical Record," vol. i.)

"Puerperal Convulsions." ("Virginia Medical Monthly," vol. v.) R. M. S. Va. Med. Monthly, vol. x, 1883.

Comegys, Cornelius George (1816-1896). Cornelius George Comegys was born July 23, 1816, on an ancestral farm, called "Cherbourg," in Delaware, his father one Cornelius Parsons Comegys, governor of Delaware from 183S-1841. The family descended from Cornelius Comegys, who came from Holland to America in 1661,

and settled on the east shore of Chesa- peake Bay, in Kent County, Maryland. The mother of Cornelius George Comegys was Ruhamah Marim, also of English ancestry.

Cornelius George, passed his early life on the farm, and after many vicissitudes and trying various trades, he matriculated at the University of Pennsylvania, where he graduated in 1848. Having taken his M. D. he practised for a year in Philadelphia, then removed to Cincinnati, Ohio, where, by his successful treatment of the Asiatic cholera in the epidemic of 1 849, he gained great distinction. Feeling the need of a wider clinical study, he went abroad in 1851 to spend a year in the medical schools of London and Paris. In the former, his especial in- struction was at Guy's Hospital; and in Paris, he was a special student of Charcot, chief of La Charite.

Upon his return to Cincinnati in 1852, he gave a course of lectures on anatomy in the College of Physicians and Surgeons, and then joined in the organization of the Miami Medical College as professor of the institutes of medicine. He held this same chair in the Medical College of Ohio, with which the Miami College united five years later, until 1868 (with the excep- tion of the years 1860-4) and in 1S57, was lecturer in clinical medicine at the Cin- cinnati Hospital.

He was one of the founders of the Cin- cinnati Academy of Medicine, and twice served as president. He was a member of the Medieo-Chirurgical Society, the Cincinnati Medical Society, Mississippi Valley Medical Association, honorary member of the Philadelphia College of Physicians and the Delaware State Med- ical Society; chief of the medical staff of Christ's Hospital, Cincinnati, from its beginning until his death. He labored earnestly and persistently for the creation of a department of public health up to that time.

His published literary works were two translations from the French: "The His- tory of Medicine," by Renouard (1S56), and " Lectures on the Pathological Anat-