Page:A cyclopedia of American medical biography vol. 1.djvu/373

DRAPER 2i DRAPER "Pioneer Life in Kentucky, a Series of Reminiscential Letters to His Children, Edited with Notes and a Biographical Sketch by his Son, Charles D. Drake," portrait. Cincinnati, 1870.

"An Oration on the Intemperance of Cities, Including Remarks on Gambling, Idleness, Fashion, and Sabbath-breaking," 30 pages, 8°. Philadelphia, 1831. A. G. D.

Mansfield (E. D.). Memoirs of the Life of Drake etc., 8°. Cincinnati, 1855.

New Jersey M, Reporter, Burlington, 1853, vi.

Tr. Col. Phys., Philadelphia, 1853, 6.

Gross's Lives of Eminent Amer. Phy., Phila., 1861.

West, J. M. and S., Louisville, 1854, 4 s., ii, L. P. Yandell.

Pepper, W. Daniel Drake, or Then and Now (J. Am. M. Assoc. Chicago. 1895. xxv).

For portrait, see collection of portraits Surg.-gen. (Lib.). Washington, D. C.

Daniel Drake and His Followers, Otto Juettner, Cincinnati, 1909.

Biographical Notice of Daniel Drake, Charles D. Meigs, 1853.

Draper, Henry (1837-1882).

Henry Draper was born in Prince Edward County, Virginia, March 7, 1837. His father, John William, was widely known as a chemist, physiologist, political philosopher, and more especially as the author of "The Intellectual Development of Europe." Three years after the birth of Henry, his second son, the elder Draper accepted the chair of chemistry in the University of the City of New York. After a course in the primary and preparatory schools, Henry was admitted, at the age of fifteen, to the academic department of the University. A medical department having been founded by his father, the son graduated from it in 1858. The following year he spent in Europe, visiting and studying, as few tourists do, places and instruments connected with great scientific investigations. What particularly attracted his attention was the six-foot reflecting telescope of Lord Rosse, and to the interest excited and the field of enterprise suggested are largely due his subsequent achievements in celestial photography. Upon his return to this city he was appointed a member of the medical staff attached to Bellevue Hospital, and for eighteen months discharged the varied duties. His tastes, however, lay in an altogether different direction, so he abandoned the practice of medicine, except the chair of physiology in the academic department of the University, accepted in 1860, and six years later he was installed professor of physiology in the medical department, but his desire to devote his attention more closely to astronomical matters in which he had already acquired well-deserved distinction prompted him to sever his connection altogether from his alma mater.

The interest manifested by the elder Draper in photography—he having been allowed by his friends the honor of having taken what in 1839 was known as the first Daguerreotype—was the stimulus for the utilization of the art in determining the character of celestial bodies. In his observatory on his father's grounds at Hastings-on-the-Hudson, he made his observations, and an incredible number of experiments in furthering his work. His first investigations in science were made when an undergraduate in the medical department at the age of twenty, by a series of experiments on the functions of the spleen, aided by microscopic photography, an art then in its infancy. It was in the course of this research that he discovered the great advantage possessed by protochloride of palladium in darkening collodion negatives. Shortly after his return from Europe he constructed a reflecting telescope of fifteen and one-half inches diameter, with which he was enabled to procure a photograph of the moon fifty inches in diameter, the largest ever made.

Prof. Draper was the first to demonstrate the superior value of chemically pure silver over all known substances in the construction of the spectrum. This was the result of the experiments resorted to in the construction of his