Page:A cyclopedia of American medical biography vol. 1.djvu/467

 GODMAN

GODMAN

walks of which he was very fond. The history of St. Elizabeth he knew from its beginning, every stone and stump within its boundaries. A great reader of books, he accumulated those of general medicine and his specialty and the best literature of the day. He made close study of cases of special interest and wrote them up.

Two good pamphlets of his are : " Two Hard Cases," Boston, 1S82; and "The Rights of the Insane in Hospital," Phila- delphia, 1884. In April, 1870, he was appointed superintendent of the State Hospital for the Insane, Taunton, Mass- achusetts, which he made altogether up to the highest standard of that time.

On September 23, 1877 Godding re- turned to St. Elizabeth to take the place of the only superintendent the Govern- ment Hospital for the Insane had then known. He died on May 6, 1899.

D. S. L.

Minutes of Medical Society, D. C, May 10

and June 7, 1899.

Transactions Medical Society, D. C, 1899, iv.

Proceedings of Amer. Med. Psych., Asson.,

1899, vi.

Bull. Philos. Soc., Washington, 1895-1900,

xiii.

Jour. Amer. Med. Asson., 1899, xxxii.

Journal Mental Science, London, 1900, xlvi.

National Medical Review, 1899-1900, ix.

Godman, John D. (1794-1830).

The few early glimpses to be had of John Godman the anatomist when he fought ill health and adversity show what wonderful energy can be generated by certain circumstances calculated to drive most men to despair. Born at An- napolis December 30, 1794, the son of one Capt. Samuel Godman, his mother died before he was two, his father a year later and an aunt to whose care he was given left him more than orphanless when he was six. He says: "Before I was six I was fatherless and friendless. I have been deprived by fraud of property which was mine. I have passed the flower of my days in little better than slavery and have arrived at what? manhood, poverty and desolation."

At the age of sixteen he was bound apprentice to the printer of a newspaper

in Baltimore and in 1814 began the study of chemistry, but during the same year enlisted in the navy as a common sailor.

In 1815 he was without employment and without means to prosecute his studies. At that time he received an invitation to live and study with Dr. Luckey of Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania, of which he immediately availed himself, and entered into the work with great zeal. He remained five months with Dr. Luckey, then returned to Baltimore in search of greater facilities, eventually be- coming the pupil of Dr. Davidge of the University of Maryland and attending the lectures of 1816-17 and 1817-18, and graduating in the latter year. He began practice in the town of New Holland, but the quiet village life was not suited to his ardent temperament. He longed for, and expected a profes- sorship in the University of Maryland. Disappointed in this, he removed to Philadelphia, where he was solicited by Dr. Daniel Drake to accept the chair of surgery in the Medical College of Ohio. He reached Cincinnati about November 1, 1821 and soon after an introductory lecture trouble arose in the faculty and he resigned. Immediately afterwards he established the " Western Quarterly Reporter," but the enterprise proved a failure and ceased after the sixth num- ber. In this brief time Dr. Godman con- tributed three-hundred pages to its con- tents.

In October, 1822 he arrived in Phila- delphia after one year in the West, just as the students were assembling for the annual course. Installing himself in rooms Godman began a course of lectures which soon made his talents a theme of remark among medical and .scientific men. His elaborate anatomical investigations giving a minute account of the fascia? of the human body were published in 1824, hut his stay mi the banks ol I In- 1'atapseo had given him chances of natural history study, and in Philadelphia he had an op- portunity of extending his investigations as a member of the Academy of Natural Sciences. To write his magnum opus