Page:A cyclopedia of American medical biography vol. 2.djvu/55

 JAMESON

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JAMESON

Princeton and Edinburgh, of science at Geneva and Oxford. He delivered a course of Lowell Lectures in Boston, of Gififord Lectures in Edinburgh, of Hibbert Lectures in Oxford. He was one of the founders, and always a chief supporter, of the Society for Psychical Research, a subject which profoundly interested him. More than once he was president of the American Psycho- logical Association and of the Boston Natural History Society.

Records of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Harvard, October 18, 1910. Harvard Univ. Gaz., 1910, vol. vi.

Jameson, Horatio Gates (1778-1855).

This surgeon was born in York, Pennsylvania, in 1778, the son of Dr. David Jameson who had emigrated to Charleston, South Carolina, in 1740 in company with Dr. Hugh Mercer.

Horatio studied medicine under his father and began practice at the early age of seventeen. After living in Somerset County, Pennsylvania, Wheel- ing, Adamstown, Pennsylvania, and Gettysburg he arrived in Baltimore in 1810 and attended lectures at the College of Medicine (University of Mary- land), and graduated M. D. in 1831, his inaugural thesis being "The Sup- posed Powers of the Uterus." For some years he combined the business of druggist with that of medicine. During the War of 1812 he was surgeon to the United States troops in Baltimore for which service his widow received a pension.

He was physician to the City Jail for several years; from 1814 to 1835 he was surgeon to the Baltimore Hos- pital; from 1821 to 1835 he was con- sulting physician to the Board of Health.

In 1827 he joined with Drs. Samuel K. Jennings, William W. Handy, James H. Miller, Samuel Annan, and John W. Vethake in founding the Washington Medical College, which college in 1839 obtained a charter conferring Univer- sity rank, but it never succeeded in

founding any other department and was suspended in 1852. In 1830, by special invitation, he visited Europe and read a paper on the " Non-contagiousness of Yellow Fever" before the Society of German Naturalists and Physicians at Haml:iurg. He was the first American to attend these meetings and the only delegate present from the new world on this occasion. In 1832 he was appointed superintendent of vaccination and im- proved the virus in use by repassing it through the cow. He also had charge of the cholera hospitals estab- lished during the terrible epidemic of that disease.

In 1835 he accepted a chair in and presidency of the Ohio Medical College at Cincinnati, but his wife's ill-health caused him to return to Baltimore after one session. In 1854 he re- moved to York and thence after a brief stay, to Philadelphia where he wrote and published his book on "Cholera." It is interesting to note that he had found the treatment of this disease more successful as it was milder and more simple. During a visit to New York for the purpose of disposing of this work he was taken suddenly ill and died August 24, 1855, at the age of seventy-six. His remains were brought to Baltimore for inter- ment. His last written article was published in the "American Journal of the Medical Sciences" for October, 1856.

Dr. Jameson was well built, erect, his face was florid, healthy and clean-shaven, and free from wrinkles; his eyes were dark brown, piercing and surmounted by bushy eyebrows. He wore heavy gold spectacles and was very neat in his attire, and was noted for his mechan- ical ingenuity.

In the "American Medical Recorder" for January, 1829, there is an account of a remarkable trial held in the Balti- more City Criminal Court in the spring of 1828. It was the result of a suit brought by Dr. Jameson against Dr. Frederick E. B. Hintze for defamation