Page:A cyclopedia of American medical biography vol. 1.djvu/418

 FAY

FAYSSOUX

" Hip-joint Amputation." (" Richmond Medical Journal," vol. i.)

"Traumatic Tetanus." ("Virginia Medical Monitor," vol. ii.)

"Hydatids of the Kidney." (Ibid., vol. v.)

"Chloroform in Obstetrical Practice." (Ibid., 1873.) R. M. S.

His family has photographs of him. Trans. Med. Soc, of Va., 1886.

Fay, Jonas (1737-181S).

Jonas Fay was born in Hardwick, the second of Stephen Fay's ten children, on January 13, 1737.

Of his youth and training, we only know that Dr. Fay had a good general education for those days, a "pen and ink training." Of his professional educa- tion there is apparently nothing known. At the age of eighteen he was in the French War at Fort Edward and Lake George in a company of Massachusetts troops, then surgeon to Ethan Ellen's expedition against Ticonderoga, and later surgeon to Warner's Regiment for the invasion of Canada. In his pro- fessional life in Bennington and else- where, he followed the routine of the average country doctor of those times.

His public services, however, give him a high place in Vermont history. He was one of the founders of the state. A man of good native endowments, of wide information, of courage and determination as well as of likeable disposition and, above all, a patriot.

Stephen Fay, his father, had come to Bennington in 1766, and kept the famous Catamount Tavern. "Land- lord Fay's" was the rendezvous for the Green Mountain Boys in the stir- ring times, when the Grants were the bone of contention between New Hampshire on one side and New York on the other. At the old hostelry, Dr. Jonas Fay was brought into fre- quent and intimate association with the leaders among the early settlers, chief of whom was the redoubtable Ethan Allen. Being a skillful draughts-

man he early became the clerk of the Committee of Safety and of the various conventions of the settlers, which re- sulted in the establishment of the new state. He drew up the most important public papers, and was the author of its Declaration of Independence. These documents, still preserved in Dr. Fay's hand writing, attest the confidence in which the author was held by the inhabitants.

He was clerk of the Dorset Conven- tion, which petitioned Congress to serve in the common cause of the country. He was again at the Westminster Con- vention, which declared Vermont to be an independent state, and he was secretary of the Convention that formed the constitution of the state in 1777. Dr. Fay continued to practice all this time and until 1800 in Bennington, when he removed to Charlotte, and later to Pawlet, but returned to Benning- ton late in life and died there March 6, 1818.

Senator Proctor discovered in 1904, in the Library of Congress, certain manuscripts relating to the early Ver- mont Conventions, and these manu- scripts, all in Dr. Fay's hand writing, he reproduced in facsimile and distributed in a bound volume. This volume contains Dr. Fay's family record, and shows him to have been twice married. By his first wife, Sarah, he had seven children. His second wife was Lydia, widow of Challis Safford, and had three children. C. S. C.

Fayssoux, Peter Dott (1745-1795).

No record of the ancestry of this army surgeon is extant, but it is known that he was born in Southern France in 1745. His mother emigrated to Charleston, South Carolina, in 1746 or 1747, where the boy grew up and was educated under the care of his step- father, James Hunter. He graduated in medicine at Edinburgh in 1774 or 1775.

Of Dr. Fayssoux's life only a few fragments have been preserved, but