Page:A cyclopedia of American medical biography vol. 1.djvu/513

 HARLAN ;

Phila. Jour, of the lied, and Phys. Sciences, 1820, vol. i.

Portrait and list of writings in the Library of the Sur-Gen. Wash. D. C.

Harlan, Richard (1796-1S43).

Richard Harlan was born in Phila- delphia September 19, 1796 and pre- vious to graduation at the medical department of the University of Penn- sylvania he made a voyage to Calcutta as surgeon of an East India ship. In 1818 Dr. I. Parrish opened a -private dis- secting room in Philadelphia and placed Harlan in charge of it. He practised in Philadelphia, was elected in 1821 professor of comparative anatomy in the Philadelphia Museum, and was surgeon to the Philadelphia Hospital. In 1839 he visited Europe a second time, and after his return in 1843 re- moved to New Orleans, and became in that year vice-president of the Louis- iana State Medical Society. He was a member of many learned societies in this country and abroad. He had finer mental than social gifts.

His chief writings were:

"Anatomical Investigations," com- prising descriptions of various fasciae of the brain, 10 pt. (8°, Philadelphia, 1824).

"Observations on the Genus Sala- mandra," Philadelphia, 1824.

"Fauna Americana," being a de- scription of the mammiferous animals inhabiting North America, 1825.

"Professional Reputation," an ora- tion delivered before the Philadelphia Medical Society February 8, 1826.

"Description of an Hermaphrodite Orang-outang lately living in Phila- delphia," 8 pp., 2 pi. 8°. (Philadelphia, 1827).

"Medical and Physical Researches," Philadelphia, 1835.

Translation of Gannal's "Hi torj of Embalming," 1S40.

C. R. B.

Harlow, John Martyn (1 SI 9-1907).

John Martyn Harlow was born in Whitehall, New York, November 25,

15 HARLOW

1819, son of Ransom and Annis (Mar- tyn) Harlow, and at the time of death eighty-seven years old. He fitted for college at the Methodist Collegiate Institute at West Poultney, Vermont, and at the Ashby Academy, Ashby, Massachusetts. In 1840 he began to study medicine and surgery at the Philadelphia School of Anatomy, and studied afterwards at the Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia. At the latter place he graduated in 1844.

In 1845 he began to practise in Ca- vendish, Vermont, where he remained for fifteen years, until obliged to re- tire on account of ill health. It was while at this place that he took charge of the case which gave him a world-wide fame among medical men, of a usually fatal wound of the brain. A young man who was tamping a hole in a rock with an iron bar an inch in diameter and three feet seven inches long, had the bar blown through his skull by the premature discharge of a blast. The explosion drove the bar completely through his head, and high in the air. Fortunately the bar was round in shape and smoothed by use. The event occurred on the thirteenth of Septem- ber, 1848, and the victim of the acident lived until May 21, 1861, when he died in San Francisco, California.

Dr. Harlow published an account of this remarkable case, entitled, "Re- covery from the Passage of an Iron Bar through the Head," and the skull and bar are now in the Warren M of the Harvard .Medical School in Boston.

Returning to Philadelphia, Dr. Har- low passed nearly three years in travel and iilv, and resumed practice in Wnl, hi n in the autumn (if 1861.

He died in Wol.iirn, .May 13, 1907. lie married twice — first to Charlotte Davis, of Acton, who died about L887; then to his second wife, Frances A. Kim- ball, of Woburn, who survived him. There wen- no children.

W. I.. 15. Obil ript, May 13, :