Page:A cyclopedia of American medical biography vol. 1.djvu/487

 GREEN J

Green, Traill (1813-1897).

An erudite professor both of botany and astronomy, Traill Green was born at Easton, Pennsylvania, on May 25, 1813, the son of Benjamin and Elizabeth Traill Green.

From boyhood he was devoted to na- ture study and afterwards, deeming med- icine would afford him special advantages, he studied under Dr. J. K. Mitchell and graduated M. D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1835. Then, returning to Easton, he began practice there. But chemistry, his darling study, was not given up and in his consulting-room at night he would give lectures on this and allied subjects to a class of young peo- ple. To the botany class came Harriet Moore of Morristown, New Jersey, who in 1844 married her professor and shared his scientific labors.

In 1837 he was made professor of chem- istry at Lafayette College and in 1865 professor of natural science. He received the A. M. degree from Rutgers in 1S41 and was later called to the chair of natural sciences at Marshall College, Pennsyl- vania, and in 1S60 Washington and Jef- ferson Colleges conferred upon him the LL. D.

Noticing with regret the incomplete training of many medical students he, with others, launched the American Academy of Medicine and was its first president. But Lafayette College was his special interest. He held so many honorable posts that the list savours of multiple personality, yet all was well done. The observatory was his gift and to it he bequeathed his books and minerals. Every good cause had an advocate in him. By voice and pen, money and enthusiasm he helped forward medical reform, tem- perance, the higher education of women. A full list of his writings and a portrait may be seen in "Proceedings of the Medical Society of Northampton County," June 18, 1S97, the chief one being "Zoological and Floral Distribution of the United States," 1861.

He died in his birthplace, Easton, on the twenty-ninth of April, 1897. D. W.

1 GREENE

The Lehigh Valley Med. Mag., 1S97.

The Botanists of Phila. and their Work. J.

W. Harshberger, Phila., 1899.

Greene, William Warren (1831-1881).

William Warren Greene, for nobody thought of calling him in any other way, was a genius in medicine and surgery. He was born in South Waterford, Maine, March 1, 1831, his father, Jacob Holt Greene, an intellectual, independent, in- ventive and, above all, a very just man. He was fierce in his anti-slavery defiance at a time when it needed a brave man to express any such opinions at all. From his father young Greene must have in- herited most of the qualities which he exhibited during his medical career. His mother, Sarah Walker Frye, was an excel- lent housewife and a genial woman. Young William had the ordinary school education of those days, but, added to this, the mental guidance of his rel- ative, the Rev. William Warren. At sixteen he began to teach school, then took up medicine with Dr. Seth C'hellis Hunkins, and later attended lectures at the Berkshire Medical College and at Ann Arbor, Michigan, where he obtained his M. D. in 1855. A short time after he was offered a demonstratorship of anatomy at Ann Arbor, which he regretfully de- clined, for he was then doing well in his practice of medicine in Gray, Maine. For a while during the Civil War he was a surgeon in the army.

His former teachers at the Berkshire Medical School had kept track of this promising young man, and a vacancy occurring in the chair of theory and prac- tice of medicine, he was offered it and accepted, beginning his lectures in No- vember, 1862.

This position he held until 1868, also that of professor of surgery in the Medi- cal School of Maine, giving his first series of clinical lectures on that im- portant branch of medicine in 1866. From that time until 1S80, he lectured i l:mUy.

Simultaneously he was professor of surgery in the University of Michigan, but resigned after one term owing to homeo-