Page:A cyclopedia of American medical biography vol. 2.djvu/176

 MASTIN

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MATTHEWS

Lord Fairfax came and settled in Maryland. His mother was a daughter of one Claudius Livert, a physician of Lyons.

The boy went to Greenville Academy Huntsville and afterwards to the Univer- sitj' of Virginia then studied medicine with Dr. John Y. Bassett, who in those anti-legal dissecting days had a room whereunto in the darkness often the dead body of a negro from some near by plantation burial ground was con- veyed up the back stairs by the stu- dents. Mastin spent many night hours there over his anatomical studies and easily took his M.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1849. He returned to Huntsville, then on to Nashville, Tennessee but eventually attended lectures at Edinburgh Univer- sity, the Royal College of Surgeons, London and in Paris, finally settling in Mobile, Alabama, to practise with his uncle Dr. Livert.

In 1861 he served as a Confederate states volunteer, afterwards with the regulars as medical director on the staff of Gen. Leonidas Polk until after the battle of Shiloh when he be- came inspector of the army of the Mississippi under Gen. Beauregard. The war over he returned to Mobile and shewed himself an expert surgeon, do- ing most of the major operations of his day. His uncle had made a series of experiments upon animals in 1828 us- ing metallic ligatures for ligation of arter- ies leaving the gold, silver or lead wire to become encysted. Nephew Claudius put the knoTv^ledge thus obtained into ac- tual practice upon the human subject, ligating the external iliac with a silver wire for aneurism of the femoral artery at Scarpa's triangle in June 1866. He was thus the first to tie successfully with a metalUc ligature a large artery in the human body. Having consid- erable ingenuity he was the inventor of several instruments: he also wrote many articles chiefly dealing with genito-urinary surgery.

In September 1848, he married Mary

E. McDowell of Huntsville, a descend- ant of Ephriam McDowell the ovarioto- mist and had two sons and two daughters. He died when seventy-two on the third of October, 1898, after an immediate illness of one week, in active service and full enjoyment of his faculties. He was a man of most striking appear- ance, tall, erect and with piercing eyes.

He held his LL.D., from the Universi- ty of Pennsylvania; and was president of the American Surgical Association in 1890-1. His keen interest in the advance of medical science led to hia founding the Congress of American Physicians and Surgeons and being a prominent organizer of the American Genito-Urinary Association. He was also a member of the Boston Gynecologi- cal Society; of the Southern Surgical and Gynecological Association and of the Central Council of the University of Pennsylvania.

His articles include:

"Inguinal Aneurism; successful liga- tion of external iliac artery by means of silver-wire," 1866.

"Internal Urethrotomy as a cure for urethral Stricture," 1871.

"Chronic Urethral Discharges," 1S72.

"A New Method of Treating Strict- ures of the Urethra," 1873.

"Subcutaneous division of Urethral Stricture," 1886.

C. H. M.

Family Papers.

Mem. Record of Alabama, vol. ii.

Alabama Med. and Surg. Age. Anniston,

1895-6, vol. viii.

Med. Rec, N. Y., 1898, vol. liv.

Tr. Am. Surg. Ass., Phila., 1900, vol. xviii.

Tr. South. Surg, and Gynec. Ass., 1902, Phila.,

1903 (port.).

Matthews, Washington (1843-1905).

Washington Matthews, having lost his mother in early infancy, his father, a physician, brought him while still a child to the United States and settled in Dubuque, Iowa. Young Matthews studied medicine under his father and later attended lectures at the Univer-