Page:American Medical Biographies - Kelly, Burrage.djvu/1098

NAME SMITH 1076 SMITH notes and additions" a treatise on Febrile Diseases by A. P. W. Phillips in 2 vols., published in Hartford, Connecticut. He also published many papers in the Philadelphia Monthly Journal, that were republished in the French medical journals. His most im- portant contribution to medicine was his cele- brated treatise entitled, "Practical Essay on Typhus (.Typhoid) Fever," New York, 1824, the first clear description of the disease and its pathology. He pointed out that the dis- ease was due to a specific cause and limited in its course and discarded the customary use of the lancet, and advised cold water and milk, eliminating all powerful medicines. An introductory lecture on the "Progress of Medical Science" was delivered at the open- ing of the medical school at Yale in 1813. An article on "The Pathology and Treatment of Necrosis" is considered a classic. As a teacher he was accurate, simple, and concise. He taught the principles of medi- cine to a large number of students, and deliv- ered about 138 courses of lectures in the various medical schools to which he was at- tached. To summarize his educational activi- ties : he was the sole founder of Dartmouth Medical School connected with the Dartmouth College, as well as of the Yale Medical School connected with the College, he participated largely in the establishment of the Bowdoin Medical School of the University of Maine, and in the Burlington Medical School of the University of Vermont. He also helped his son Nathan Ryno to organize the Jefferson Medical College. He was a brilliant oper- ator, a great teacher, a valuable contributor to medical literature, a successful practitioner, and a pioneer in his profession. His mind was highly retentive, he had a clear discrimi- nation, was a man of wide observation, and of rare common sense in the adaptation of common practical expedients to the needs of his professional work. He had great moral courage, and yet withal a notable gentleness of manner, and an affectionate disposition. Resourceful, self-reliant, he was ingenious as a surgeon and skilful as a diagnostician in internal medicine, a rare combination unknown in this twentieth century. His vision of the needs of the future was clear and his judg- ment sound, anticipating what is now gen- erally accepted by modern educators, namely the need of a union of medical schools with established universities, in place of the pro- prietary medical colleges so common up to the end of the nineteenth century. Nathan Smith also demanded a higher education in medicine, and was an opponent of the super- ficial knowledge of his day and later. He was in open warfare against the quack and the bone setter and did much to effect the ultimate downfall of these and other "abomi- nations" of his age. William H. Welch in his Yale address eulogized him as "Famous in his day and generation, he is still more famous today for he was far ahead of his times, and his reputation unlike that of so many medical worthies of the past has stead- ily increased as the medical profession has slowly caught up with him. W^e now see that he did more for the general advance- ment of medical and surgical practice than any of his predecessors or contemporaries in this country. He was a man of high intel- lectual and moral qualities, of great origi- nality and untiring energy, an accurate and keen observer unfettered by traditions and theories, fearless, and above all blessed with an uncommon fund of plain "common sense." Frederic S. Dennis. The Life and Letters of Nathan Smith, edited by Emily Smith, Yale University Press. 1914. Medical and Surgical Memoirs, Nathan Smith, Baltimore, 1831, Portrait. . Eulogium on Nathan Smith pronounced at his funeral. New Haven, 1829, J. Knight. Dartmouth Medical College and Nathan Smith. An Historical Discourse by Oliver P. Hubbard, M. D- 1880. Smith, Nathan Ryno (1797-1877) Nathan Ryno Smith was the secot-j of the four sons of Dr. Nathan Smith (q. v.), the distinguished New England surgeon and found- er of Dartmouth and Yale College Medical Schools. The name "Ryno" was derived from the Poems of Ossian, a favorite author of his mother. He was born on May 21, 1797, in the town of Cornish, New Hampshire, where his father had been practising for ten years. After having received a preliminary- training at Dartmouth, he entered Yale as a freshman in 1813 and graduated A. B. in 1817, at the age of twenty and in 1823 re- ceived from Yale College the degree of M. D., in his inaugural thesis defending the view that the effects of remedies and diseases are due to absorption into the blood and not ta an impression on the nervous system, as many eminent writers then maintained. He continued his experiments on this subject, and his publications in 1827 are referred to by Dr. Alfred Stille (q. v.) in his work on "Therapeutics," vol. i, p. 51. He began practice at Burlington, Vermont, in 1824, and in the following year he was appointed to the professorship of surgery and' anatomy in the University of Vermont. While in Philadelphia he met Dr. George