Page:American Medical Biographies - Kelly, Burrage.djvu/101

BEACH called to large cities, sometimes to other states, to perform operations, and his advice was often sought by persons from a distance. He is known to anatomists as the discoverer and demonstrator of the vascularity of the rete mucosum.

He discharged his duties to society in a most exemplary manner, and while he had eccentricities of temper, and was somewhat gloomy and austere, he had a warm heart and was ever a friend and benefactor to the poor and needy. Virginia has furnished another remarkable instance of a similar successful career in a remote country district in the career of Dr. J. P. Mettauer. Dr. Baynham married a daughter of the Rev. John Mathews of Essex County. He died on the eighth of December, 1814, on the day after he had completed the sixty-sixth year of a useful and laborious life.

He did two successful operations for ectopic pregnancy, one in 1790, the second in 1799, and he is supposed to have been the first surgeon who did this successfully. His account of these operations was published in the New York Medical and Physical Journal and Review, vol. i. Several posthumous accounts of surgical cases were published in the Philadelphia Journal of Medical and Physical Sciences.



Beach, Wooster (1794–18591868 [sic])

Wooster Beach, the founder of "Eclecticism" in the United States, a reformer of medical practice, was born at Trumbull, Connecticut, in 1794. He had little education beyond that received in the country schools. His ambition to study medicine was gratified by being taken as a pupil by Dr. Jacob Tidd, a German herb doctor who had practised in Amwell, Hunterdon County, New York, for forty years, and with Tidd he stayed until the latter's death. Being called to New York to take care of several cases, Beach was urged to settle there and was said to have become a student at the medical college of the University, graduating in due form, and becoming a member of the New York County Medical Society.

In 1823 he married Eliza de Grove. They had a happy married life, and a son, Wooster Beach, succeeded his father in practice.

In 1825 Beach started teaching and writing as an empiric. He opposed the prevailing heroic practice of blood-letting and purging with mercurials, holding that the student should keep an open mind, observe, avoid a routine system and treat disease with nature's remedies,—herbs and roots. Two years later he opened the United States Infirmary in Eldridge Street, New York, where he treated several thousand patients, and in 1837 he started the New York Medical Academy which later became the Reformed Medical College of New York, the parent school of "Reformed Medicine." It had a short life as many of its supporters moved to Worthington, Ohio, to establish a medical department in a new university there. Beach was opposed to Thompsonianism and its doctrine of "Heat is life, and cold is death." He disowned the so-called new advance in regard to the matter of sexual relation, made by the lay preacher, Theophilus R. Gates of Philadelphia, with whom he had been associated.

In 1832, on the first visitation of Asiatic cholera to New York, he was appointed by one of the aldermen to take charge of the poor who were afflicted with the disease and treated nearly a thousand cases, avoiding the use of calomel and all heroic treatment, with good results.

Dr. Beach was the author of at least a dozen medical works. He appreciated early in his career the importance of the press in spreading information about his views and for many years he published The Telescope, and in 1837, a sheet entitled The Ishmaelite. In 1833 appeared his "American Practice of Medicine," in three volumes. Copies were sent to the crowned heads of Europe and the author received many commendatory letters. Other text-books followed and were finally condensed into one volume: "The Reformed Practice of Medicine."

He was as strenuous in demanding reform in religion as he was in medicine. He held that current notions and practices were almost diametrically opposed to the teachings of the Bible. He had little regard for the conventionalities of society, and his peculiarities were in evidence wherever he went. He was an enthusiast and a persistent worker; many called him a fanatic. Once during a controversy with a Dr. Sperry of Connecticut, the latter remarked half disdainfully: "You are an eclectic." Dr. Beach replied quickly: "You have given me the term; I am an eclectic." It is likely that those who embraced his views did not realize that later they were to be enrolled under such a title.

After the closing of the Reformed medical school at Worthington, Ohio, in 1848, a call was issued for a convention to meet at Cincinnati to take measures for the