Page:A cyclopedia of American medical biography vol. 1.djvu/314

 CORNETT

CORSS

settled at Morrisville, Virginia in 1845 and began at once to build up a large country practice.

He was a member of the Medical Soci- ety of Virginia, and was in 1882 elected president of the State Society, and made an honorary member the year following.

Dr. Cooper married in June, 1845, Miss Mattie F. Henry, daughter of Fountain Henry, Esq., of Culpeper County.

Catarrh of the stomach with liver complications caused his death on Oc- tober 30, 1897, at his home in Morris- ville, Virginia.

His contributions to medical literature were not numerous, but were of con- siderable value. The following may be read with interest:

"Presidential Address." ("Transac- tions of Medical Society of Virginia," 1883.)

" Protracted Labor." (" Virginia Med- ical Monthly," vol. xi.)

" Carious Destruction of Two Cervical and Dorsal Vertebrae; Death; Post- mortem." ("Transactions of Medical Society of Virginia," 1888.)

R. M. S.

" Transactions of Medical Society of Virginia," 1S9S.

Cornett, William T. S. (1805-1897).

William T. S. Cornett, who did good work as a pioneer physician with only a few books and common sense, was born at Carrolton, Kentucky on July 11, 1S05. His early life presented the too common combination of a widowed mother with a bright son and little money. For three years he compounded drugs with a general practitioner then studied medi- cine at Transylvania University, and when nineteen, funds being exhausted, offered his medical services to the sick in Dearborn, Indiana. Where was his license and diploma? asked the local censors. He obtained them in examina- tion before them. Then this lad of twenty was, for three years, the only doctor in Versailles, Ripley County, Indiana, with the books of Cullen and Thomas as guides

and plenty of cholera, dysentery and fever to give him experience. He was of opinion that remittent and intermittent fevers, so common in that thickly tim- bered and swampy district, were as specifically different as small-pox and measles. He noted, before the days of quinine, chronic intermittents were com- mon, lasting six months or even a ye:ir, but remittent fever killed the patient or subsided within a given time, and if there was unity of cause there should be a unity of effect. Like Dewees the obstetrican, he also held to bleeding as a relief in blood pressure on the brain in puerperal convulsions. His contributions to medical literature were chiefly in the "Transactions of the Indiana State Med- ical Society" and in the southern and western journals. When in the state senate he obtained a grant to start a lunatic asylum, and a farm was purchased and converted into one. (" Senate Journal," 1843.)

He held an M. D. from the University of Louisville and also from the Central medical College of Indiana.

After forty years of hard work in Versailles he removed to Madison, always retaining his interest in medical progress. His energy found vent in geological studies and collecting specimens. He had two children by his wife Mary Mason, a native of Bristol, England.

W. R. D.

Corss, Frederic (1842-190S).

Frederic Corss, born in Athens, Penn- sylvania, January 16, 1S42, was a son of the Rev. Charles L. Corss, Presbyterian minister, and of Ann Hoyt Corss. He was descended from James Corss of Greenfield, Massachusetts, who died in 1696.

He graduated A. B. from Lafayette College in 1862 and took his A. M. in 1865 and his M. D. from Pennsylvania University in 1866. In the same year he settled in Kingston, Pennsylvania, where he continued up to the time of his last illness. Here, in 1S72, he married Martha S. Hoyt, who survived him.