Page:A cyclopedia of American medical biography vol. 1.djvu/534

 HILDRETH

HILDRETH

settled down to practise in Hempstead, New Hampshire. In September, 1806, he mounted his horse, carrying with him all his possessions, and directed his course towards Marietta, Ohio. On reaching the town, October 4, 1S06, he began practice at once, but the inhabitants of a flourishing town call- ed Belprie (Belpre), some fourteen miles further down the river, appeal- ed to him to come to them, because they had no physician among them, and Dr. Hildreth went at once, reach- ing there December 10, 1S06, the very night on which the unfortunate Blen- nerhassett abandoned forever his fairy isle, which lay just off Belprie in the river. In the following summer an extensive epidemic of malarial fever prevailed along the course of the Ohio river, and Dr. Hildreth found his hands full. However, in August he managed to snatch sufficient time from the pressing duties of his profes- sion to marry Rhoda Cook, an immi- grant from New Bedford, Massachu- setts. An attack of lameness in one of his hips, due it was believed to excess- ive riding on horseback, induced Dr. Hildreth to return to Marietta in March, 1S0S, and there he remained until his death on July 24, 1863.

Dr. Hildreth was always interested in the advancement of the medical profession, and in 1811 drafted and secured the passage of a bill for the reg- ulation of the practice of medicine and for the organization of medical societies in Ohio. This bill became law.

As a medical writer Dr. Hildreth was one of the best known of his day, and his papers were received with pleasure by the few journals then ex- isting. As early as 1S0S he contrib- uted to the "New York Medical Repository" (volume x) a very full account of the epidemic of malarial fever which had prevailed in the Ohio valley during the preceding year. In 1S12 he contributed to the same journal (volume xv) a

description of the American Colombo, with a drawing of the plant, and in 1822 (volume xxii) articles on hy- drophobia and a curious case of Sia- mese twins occurring in his own practice. In 1822-23 a widespread epidemic of malarial fever again pre- vailed throughout the Ohio valley, and was described in the following year (1824) by Dr. Hildreth who had himself suffered from the disease and recovered under the treatment of "Jesuits' bark in quarter ounce doses every two hours, alternated with a solution of arsenic." This description was in the "Philadelphia Journal of the Medical and Physical Sciences," and followed by an article on the sequela? of the epidemic, which appeared in the "Western Journal of Medicine" at Cincinnati in 1S25.

Dr. Hildreth was president of the Ohio Medical Convention of 1S39, and on retiring from office delivered a valedictory address on the diseases and the climatology of southeastern Ohio, most interesting and valuable in character. ("Journal of Proceedings of Medical Convention," Ohio, 1839.)

But, in addition to these strictly medical subjects, Dr. Hildreth was an earnest and enthusiastic student of natural history, geology and climatol- ogy, on all of which subjects he wrote papers of value, and at his Marietta home he collected and preserved an extensive cabinet of natural history. A journal of diseases observed by the doctor in his long practice, a bill of mortality in Marietta since 1824, with thermometric and barometric records for a long term of years, complete the catalogue of the useful results of the busy life of this pioneer physician of Ohio in the first half of the nineteenth century.

Some of the conditions of medical practice in Ohio at this period may be learned from the following extract from an address by Dr. Hildreth before the Medical Convention of Ohio in 1839.