Page:A cyclopedia of American medical biography vol. 1.djvu/539

 HIXGSTOX

HINGSTON

An excellent portrait of Dr. Himes was presented by his widow to the Cleveland Medical Library Associa- tion, of which he was an original and zealous member.

H. E. H.

Transactions of the Ohio State Medical Society, 1895.

Hingston, William Hales (1829-1907).

Dr. Hingston was the first son of Samuel James Hingston and his second wife, Eleanor McGrath, of Montreal. He was born June 29, 1829, at Hinchin- brook, near Huntingdon. His father was lieutenant-colonel of militia and a native of Ireland. The boy was ed- ucated at the local grammar school, conducted by John — afterwards Sir John — Rose, and at thirteen went to the College of the Sulpicians in Mon- treal. He was obliged to leave school to seek employment and was appren- ticed to a druggist.

In 1847 he entered McGill Univer- sity and graduated in 1851, afterwards going to Edinburgh and studying under Simpson and Syme; to London where he entered at St. Bartholomew's Hos- pital, and to Dublin where he worked with Stokes, Corrigan and Graves. A visit to Paris, Berlin, Heidelberg, and Vienna completed his travels, and he returned to Montreal in 1853. The following year there was an outbreak of cholera, and it was during that epi- demic Dr. Hingston laid the founda- tion of a practice which he preserved and developed until the day of his death.

In 1S60 he was appointed to the staff of the Hotel Dieu. His first operation was a resection of the elbow- joint, which was new in Europe at the time, and had not been done pre- viously in Canada. In 1872 he was the first to remove at one operation the tongue and lower jaw. Ho was a great surgeon when greatness in surgery consisted in courage, decision, and rapidity in operation, but no sur- geon trained in that hard school has

ever been able to master the meticu- lous routine of modern asepsis. Dr. Hingston never entirely acquired the technic; indeed he was never fully convinced of its importance.

Sir William was a Roman Catholic in religion, an Irishman by birth, a gentleman by nature, and spoke French as well as English. Consequently he was high in the councils of the church and an important person in the various medical interests which that body controls in Quebec. In 1S82 he became professor of clinical surgery in Victoria University where he had been giving clinical lectures without an appointment since 1860. Five years later he became dean, and occupied the chair till the union of Vic- toria and Laval in 1891. From that time till his death he occupied the chair of clinical surgery in Laval.

He was three times president of the Montreal Medico-Chirurgical Society, and in 1892 delivered the address in surgery before the British Medical Association; in 1900 he was made hon- orary fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons, (London).

Sir William Hingston had also a public career. He was mayor of Mon- treal in 1875, and was appointed to the Senate in 1896. The previous year he had been created knight bach- elor. In addition he had large finan- cial interests and acquired a consider- able fortune. He was well known outside of Canada, and moved with freedom in the larger world, always impressing by-standers with a sense of ease, dignity and kindliness.

Sir William married Margaret Jose- phine, daughter of the late Hon. D. A. Macdonald, lieutenant-governor of On- tario, and had four sons and a daugh- ter. The eldest son studied for the priesthood in the Society of Jesus; the second son, Donald, became a doc- tor on the Hotel Dieu StalT.

The father died in Montreal, Feb. 19, 1907, in the seventy-ninth year of his age, the immediate cause of his death