Page:American Medical Biographies - Kelly, Burrage.djvu/1097

NAME SMITH 1075 SMITH United States. On arriving in New Haven he met with a painful accident and was cared for in the family of George Woolsey, father of Ex-President Woolsey, where he remained a guest all winter. On recovering he began his duties as professor of theory and prac- tice of physic, surgery and obstetrics. In addition to Smith the Yale medical faculty consisted of Aeneas Munson, Eli Ives, Ben- jamin Silliman and Jonathan Knight (q. v. to all). There were thirty students matricu- lated October 13, 1813, a large class for the first year. Smith moved his family to New Haven in the spring of 1817, and delivered his last course of lectures at Dartmouth, declining an election as professor, and settled finally in New Haven to teach and to practise medicine. His son Solon graduated at the Yale Med- ical School and received his M. D. in the class of 1816; his second son. Nathan Ryno (q. v.), received the degree of A. B. from Yale in the class of 1817, and in 1820 his M. D. also at Yale. Solon began to practise medicine in Sutton, Massachusetts, in 1819. A third son Dr. James Morven Smith, born Septem- ber 23, 1805, died April 26, 1853. Having received his degree of M. D. from Yale in 1828, he practised for twenty years in West- field and Springfield, Massachusetts, and at the age of 48 was killed in a railroad acci- dent at Norwalk, Connecticut, leaving a son David Paige Smith (q. v.), a prominent sur- geon of Springfield. The fourth son. Dr. John Derby Smith, was born April 9, 1912 and died April 26, 1884. He received his A. B. at Yale in 1832. Originally ordained a minister, he preached at Charlemont, Massa- chusetts, for ten ydars, and then studied medicine with his brother, Nathan Ryno, and graduated M. D. at the University of Mary- land in 1846. He was an assistant surgeon in the Civil war. In the spring of 1821 the medical school of Maine was organized at Bowdoin, and Nathan Smith gave the first course of med- ical lectures in the summer to a class of twenty-one, the following year there were forty-nine members, and in 1829 nearly a hundred. He lectured at Bowdoin until 1826 when he resigned. These summer lectures at Bowdoin did not interfere with his New Haven work. In 1821 the University of Ver- mont at Burlington established its medical department and his son N. Ryno was elected to the chair of surgery, and anatomy, and while Nathan still lectured at Yale and Bowdoin, he also gave lectures at Burling- ton, and thus was largely interested in the organizing of another medical school. In 1825 Nathan Smith helped to start the Jefferson Medical College of Philadelphia in connection with Dr. McClellan (q. v.) and Nathan Ryno Smith (q. v.). He discon- tinued his lectures at Bowdoin and Burling- ton to give his entire time to the Yale Medical School. So much for his unparalleled ac- tivities as a peripatetic organizer of medical colleges. As a surgeon Nathan Smith ranks among the greatest America has produced. He was, befitting his era, a conservative, but when convinced that operation was necessary he then advanced without hesitation and with- out regard to criticism or fear of failure. In lithotomy the great operation of his day he lost but two patients in thirty-two opera- tions; he never lost a patient by hemorrhage during an operation. In 1821 he performed ovariotomy in Connecticut without knowing that it had ever been done before ; he dropped the pedicle into the abdominal cavity, an im- portant advance in the technique, instead of suturing it into the abdominal wall. He is said to have been the first to perform staphy- lorrhaphy for cleft palate; he devised a new method of flaps in amputating the thigh. He was also a successful operator for cataract. He originated the manipulation method in reducing a dislocation of the hip, inspired by an accident to a sailor who had a disloca- tion of the hip and was thrown from his hammock in a heavy sea, when striking on the flexed knee of the affected side his dis- location was reduced. Smith then advised flexion of the affected knee with abduction or adduction, as the case might require and then by manipulation successfully reduced the dislocation. He also reduced a dislocation of the shoulder of nine weeks standing. Anesthesia was of course then unknown. He also contributed much to our knowledge of the management of fractures of the thigh. He was among the first in the country to vaccinate which he did prior to August 25, 1800; Dr. Benjamin Waterliouse (q. v.) had preceded him on July 8, 1800. As a writer he was not voluminous; but his contributions are always of value. His first ar- ticle was his inaugural dissertation mentioned, and among his early papers was one pubKshed in the Massacluisctts Magazine, 1791, Vol. 3, pages 33-81, entitled, "Dissertation on the Causes and Effects of Spasms in Fever." Another was published in the memoirs of the Medical Society of London, 1805, Vol. 6, page 227, on "The Observations on the Position of Patients in the Operation for Lithotomy." In 1816 he "edited with copious