Page:A cyclopedia of American medical biography vol. 1.djvu/516

 HARRIS

HARRISON

worked at the Demilt Dispensary in New York. Then followed some clin- ical study in Paris and a final settling down to work with his father in Phila- delphia where he practised for over thirty-five years. Surgery possessed the strongest possible attraction for him and he followed its development along gynecological lines with extreme interest. He was, besides, perhaps the most prominent medical statistican this country has ever seen. He presented the College of Physicians with an autograph manuscript of all the Cesar- ean sections in the United States up to date and this study brought to his notice cases in which laceration of the abdomen and of the uterus by the horns of cattle had resulted in the de- livery of a living child. He publish- ed a paper in the "American Journal of Obstetrics" (1SS7) entitled "Laceration of the Abdomen and Uterus in Preg- nant Women," which gave nine cases of cow-horn delivery with five living children, and in 1S92 another "Ab- dominal and Uterine Tolerance in Pregnant Women, " giving eleven more cases — -"a better showing for the cow horn than the knife, " as he remarked.

Another valuable statistical object was collecting the fate of all the viable extrauterine children. A statistical paper on "Ectopic Gestation" involved him in an imbroglio with Lawson Tait who called him "a library surgeon." This paper was translated into German by A. Eidman of Frankfurt-on-Maine and appeared in the " Monatschrift f iir Geburtshiilfe und Gynakologie " for Au- gust, 1S97. Many of the editorials in the "Medical News" (Phila.) were from his pen. He took up Loretta's operation for divulsion of the pylorus. He edited "Playfair's Midwifery" in this country for Lee Brothers. The last article he wrote "Congenital Absence of the Penis with the Urethra making its Exit into or below the Rectum," appeared in the "Philadelphia Medical Journal" for January, 1S98.

In the February of 1S99, he had a

second stroke of paralysis following one in 1S95, and he died after a few days' illness in his seventy-seventh year. His income was always rather slender and he never married or kept a house but boarded out.

Besides his private value as a firm friend and Christian he is entitled to great respect and admiration as a man who investigated knowledge accumu- lated in the past and placed all that was valuable in it at the service of others. H. A. K.

Am. Gyn. and Obstet. Jour., N. Y., 1S99, vol.

xv. (C. P. Noble.)

Brit. Med. Jour., Lon., 1S99, vol. ii.

J. Am. M. Ass., Chicago, 1S99, vol. xxii.

Harrison, John Pollard (1796-1S49).

John Pollard Harrison, physician, teacher and writer, of Cincinnati, Ohio, was born in Louisville, Kentucky, June 5, 1796, a son of Maj. John Harrison, of Virginia, an officer in the Revolutionary War; his mother, Mary Ann Johnson, a daughter of Benjamin Johnson, sixth and youngest son of Sir William Johnson, Bart.

He received his early education from the Rev. John Todd, a Presbyterian clergyman of Louisville. When about fifteen he began the study of medicine with Dr. John Croghan and in 1817 went to Philadelphia to attend the medical lectures of the University of Penns3 - lvania, and studied under Drs. Chapman and Dewees. In April, 1S19, he received his M. D. from the univer- sity and began practice immediately in Louisville. In 1S20 he married Miss Mary T. Warner of Philadelphia.

In 1820 the Louisville Hospital was founded. Dr. Harrison was one of the attending physicians, and there began his career as a teacher. In 1S35 he removed to Philadelphia, where he published a volume of medical essays. During that year also he was elected professor of materia medica in the Cincinnati College, his associates being Daniel Drake, S. D. Gross, and others of note.