Page:A cyclopedia of American medical biography vol. 1.djvu/328

 CUTBUSH

CUTTER

unless we include the numerous infants he brought into the world, through the mediation of women and his great obstet- rical skill.

He rarely, if ever, wrote a medical paper, but travelled far and wide around Wiscassett, and did excellent surgical and medical work for many years.

He was born in Wiscassett August 26, 1810, lived and died there. He was edu- cated at the Academy, taught school for a while in order to earn some money, and finally attended medical lectures at the Medical School of Maine, where he grad- uated in the class of 1836. He left an al- most unequalled record for a country practitioner of five thousand obstetric cases. His fame in medicine may rest upon the fact that as a common country doctor, in a small town, he reduced skill- fully eight hip-joint dislocations, ampu- tated twice at the knee-joint for gangrene, both patients being over eighty years of age. They lived several years after the operation and died of some other affection.

He was fond of referring most diseases to an over-loaded liver, equally fond of giving calomel as a cure, and was exces- sively opinionated and obstinate in these two beliefs.

It is said of him that he attended his very last case of confinement while suffer- ing from the epidemic influenza. To its insidious influence he finally succumbed a day or two later, from double pneu- monia.

He departed from the scenes of his busy life January 24, 1S90, in Wiscassett, to which town, and to its people, he had devoted, with untiring energy, his entire life. J. A. S.

Trans. Maine Med. Assoc, 1891.

Cutbush, Edward (1772-1843).

Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Edward Cutbush, surgeon of the United States Navy, obtained the degree of M. D. at the University of Pennsylvania in 1794 and for seven years was attending physician of Pennsylvania Hospital. In

1799 he entered the navy and for several years held the position of chief surgeon of the Mediterranean fleet. Returning to the United States he was stationed chiefly at Washington. In 1829, after thirty years of faithful service in the navy, he resigned his position and retired to Geneva, New York, where he was elected professor of chemistry and dean of the medical faculty of the college. Besides a number of articles in various medical journals he published a volume entitled " Observations on the Means of Preserv- ing the Health of Sailors and Soldiers" (180S), which, in its time, commanded considerable attention. A. A.

Williams, Am. Med. Biogr., Greenfield, 1845.

Cutter, Ammi Ruhamah (1705-1746).

Ruhamah is a woman's name, and in the early days of the Cutter family belonged to an aunt of the Rev. Ammi Ruhamah Cutter of North Yarmouth, in the district of Maine. This gentleman, named half for an uncle and half for an aunt was the father of Dr. Cutter of Ports- mouth, and a doctor of medicine himself, as will be worth explaining and describing before drawing a portrait of his wider known son.

To begin with his first title the Rev. Ammi Cutter was the son of Samuel and Rebecca Rolfe Cutter of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and baptized there May 6, 1705. He graduated from Harvard in the class of 1725 and after studying divinity, received a call from the church at North Yarmouth at a salary of £120 in silver, together with a parsonage not then finished and a large wood lot. He did his best to teach his flock in a church abound- ing in cracks through which the chilly wintry air circulated much to their discomfort, and had before long the good fortune to marry Miss Dorothy Bradbury, originally from Newburyport.

After a year or two the parson's creed began to be "offensive" to his people, the church sat "uneasy" beneath his theology, and he was asked to resign. Immediately upon leaving the pulpit he