Page:A cyclopedia of American medical biography vol. 2.djvu/341

 RAMSAY

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RAMSAY

burgh in 1805, for he then personally received an honorary degree from Aber- deen, took a look at his property, and continued work on his anatomical plates.

Returning to New York, in 1806, he tried to establish a new medical school in connection with Drs. Douglass, Hosack and Miller, but the plan failed. The next year saw him lecturing in various cities, and in ISOS we find him engaged by Dr. Nathan Smith to give his anatom- ical lectures at the Dartmouth Medical School, where many practitioners and students flocked to listen to his reputed eloquence. Old letters tell us that Dr. Spalding, of Portsmouth, furnished several subjects, carting them across the state in barrels of rum. Others tell us that the only man living who could manage Ramsay was Nathan Smith, who laughed him out of his fits of anger and brought smiles to his face once more. Ramsay offered a gold medal to the best dissection made during the course, and at night lectured on natural history.

The London papers bear witness that Ramsay was there in 1810, and that he traveled about England lecturing and begging money for his school atFryeburg, District of Maine, until 1816. He also wrote for the medical magazines, articles on " Contractions of the Muscular System from Intellectual Influence," and in 1812-13 published the first parts of his system of anatomy embracing the brain and the heart; truly wonderfully en- graved.

Although his temper was notorious, he still had friends, among whom were the Duke of Sussex and his two body physicians. Sir Joseph Banks, and other men of influence. Having decided to sail once more to America, he applied with the endorsement of his friends for a free passage on a government vessel, carrying out the British Ambassador. He claimed that his great services to medicine in studying the yellow fever and publishing his great work on anat- omy deserved this reward, but his request was declined.

He lectured in New York in 1816, and

then at the medical school at Fairfield, where, although his knowledge was admired, he was soon detested for intro- ducing religious discussions into his medical lectures. 1817 found him in Charleston, South Carolina, and then in Savannah, Georgia. At the one place, he collected a herbarium of medical plants, at the other he carried on a newspaper squabble with an editor who had insulted him on his deformity of body. His ex- penses on this trip were large, amounting to not less than $3,000.

From this year to the end of his life in 1824, Ramsay was incessantly at work, mostly in New England. In one year he petitioned the New Hampshire Legisla- ture to establish an Institution for Anat- omy at Conway in that State. In another year he asked the legislature of Maine to aid him for an institution at Fryeburg. His applications were both in vain. At that time he valued his anatomical museum at $14,000, and threatened in each State to send it back to Europe, unless he were assisted with money. He was elected honorary member of the New Hampshire Medical Society, and read before it his "Personal Experiences from a bite by a Rattle- snake." The topics of his lectures were generally: "The Animal and Intellectual Economy of Human Nature as Foimded on Comparative Anatomy," and "Dis- section as a Basis of Physiology, Anat- omy, Surgery and Medicine." Arriving in a town, he would advertise for money to complete his Academy, from which there should be no appeal in medicine. He asserted that Columbia should ask him to found such an institution, instead of his demeaning himself to beg for it. Dr. Ingalls, of Boston, offered him, at one time, his lecture-room, but the attend- ance and receipts were small. Ingalls is said to have been one of the few who could manage him, despite his temper.

The winter of 1821 found Ramsay lecturing in Montreal and other Canadian cities. His learning was brilliant, as ever, but the man behind was hard to deal with. 1823 laid him low with a