Page:A cyclopedia of American medical biography vol. 1.djvu/361

 DORSEY 2

and from 1858 to 1S63 professor of materia medica in the Maryland College of Pharmacy. In 1S66 the chair of physiology was created for him in the University of Maryland, hygiene and general pathology being added to the title, with clinical instruction in diseases of the throat and chest. After a service of fourteen years he retired from the didactic part of his chair and in 1888 abandoned teaching altogether.

Dr. Donaldson was an expert in physi- cal diagnosis, and most of his writings, which were very numerous, especially in the form of journal articles, related to the chest and throat. His most impor- tant production was a section on "Dis- eases of the Pleura," in " Pepper's System of Medicine," vol. iii, pp. 483-601; he is also the author of a fine memoir of Dr. Charles Frick, in Gross' "Lives of Eminent American Physicians of the Nineteenth Century," 1861.

Besides the positions named, Dr. Donaldson held many others of influence and honor, the most important being: President of the Medical and Chirurgical Faculty of Maryland, 1881-1882; presi- dent of the American Climatological Association; consulting physician to the Johns Hopkins Hospital. He was also an associate fellow of the College of Physi- cians of Philadelphia.

He died in Baltimore, December 0, 1891, of "albuminuria and fatty heart."

He married Elizabeth Winchester, daughter of William Winchester, of Baltimore, who survived him with two sons and three daughters. His oldest son became a doctor. E. F. C.

Cordell's Annals of Maryland, 1903 (port.).

Dorsey, John Syng (1783-1818).

John Syng Dorsey, surgeon and writer, came of an old English family — the D'Orseys — some of whom had crossed the Atlantic and settled in Maryland.

His father, Leonard Dorsey, was a suc- cessful merchant in Philadelphia where John was born.

It is hardly necessary to say he was a bright scholar, for after receiving his

, DORSEY

classical education at the Friend's Acad- emy he graduated at the age of fifteen at Pennsylvania University and began at once the study of medicine under his illustrious uncle. His entrance into the medical world was coincident with the end of the most terrible epidemic of yellow fever which had ever stricken Philadelphia, and young Dorsey, who had taken his M. D. at the age of nineteen, was appointed one of the resident physicians at the City Hospital and entered into the light against the scourge, the suggested danger not troubling him at all, for the academy of medicine held the view of Dr. Deveze, who in 1799 had maintained that yellow fever was not contagious. A hundred years later the same opinion was re-affirmed and the non-contagious nature of yellow fever established by a commission.

While thus in the very midst of the battle Dorsey improved every oppor- tunity of studying the disease and per- formed numerous autopsies, making care- ful bedside observations.

It was extraordinary that a youth not quite twenty should display such inde- pendent thought and action in so intri- cate a field as medicine, but it was a re- sult of his inherent ability and the early training and being made to carefully en- ter up cases. Some of these books have been kept. The composition is simple but the descriptions clear and accurate presaging the future author of the first important American text-book on surgery.

In November, 1803, young Dorsey sailed for Europe with the intention of spending his time in the then two great medical centers, London and Paris. In London there lived and worked John Hunter and it was in Hunter's private dissecting-room that Dorsey's uncle dis- tinguished himself as a pupil and received from his master the flattering offer of a partnership. Sir Kverard Home, Hunt- er's brother-in-law, gave Dorsey a kindly welcome and the student at once plunged into hard work, attending diligently Hunter's Anatomical School. With this