Page:American Medical Biographies - Kelly, Burrage.djvu/1173

NAME TOLAND 1151 TOLMIE of Lexington, Kentucky, taking his degree while barely of age. In 1829 he settled in Page- ville, South Carolina, and during this time per- formed several important operations which gave him considerable reputation in the neigh- borhood. This circumstance gave the young doctor a desire to perfect himself in surgery, and, determining to go to Paris, he utilized his time. During the two years at Pageville Dr. Toland saved about three thousand dollars, and in the spring of 1833 he sailed for France and sought quarters in Rue de I'Ecole de Med- icine, Paris, where he lived economically for the next two years and a half, and applied his time in constant attendance under illustrious surgeons in the hospital clinics. During the succeeding twelve years. Dr. To- land practised alone, and married Mary Good- win, who lived only a few years. In 1844 he married Mary Avery, of Columbia, who in 1852 accompanied him to California. Early in 1852 the doctor purchased a quartz mill and had it shipped to San Francisco, but his mining ventures never succeeded in San Francisco. Until 1860 Dr. Toland included obstetrical cases in his practice, but deter- mined to give this up on account of the dis- turbance of his night's rest. At this time he married his third wife, Mrs. Mary B. M. Grid- ley. On the breaking out of the Civil War in 1861, Dr. Toland's annual income was over forty thousand dollars. He had been appointed surgeon to the Marine Hospital in 1855, and tlie appointment was renewed yearly until the establishment of the City and County Hospital, where he was appointed visiting surgeon. Patients from the entire Pacific Coast sought the San Francisco City and County Hospital for treatment. In 1866 he founded a college of Medicine, known for the next six years as "Toland Medi- cal College." He had secured a suitable lot on Stockton, near Chestnut Street. He alone supplied the funds necessary to erect a sub- stantial brick building and to furnish it with the adjuncts deemed requisite. Toland had, for some years previously, been publishing the Pacific Medical Journal, and in 1872 it was renamed the Western Lancet. Although Dr. Toland was accredited with some sternness of manner when dealing with men patients, his manner toward women and children was exceedingly gentle and sympa- thetic. During the seventies there was much written about the power of iodides in the cure of the later symptoms of syphilis. Dr. Toland vigor- ously combated this idea and insisted that mer- cury, and mercury only, was really curative in syphilis at any stage. As a surgical operator Dr. Toland was rapid, direct and abundantly resourceful in the pres- ence of unexpected developments. To the dis- interested witness he perhaps might not appear to be particularly dexterous, but he always knew exactly what he meant to do, and did it in the most direct way. Toland took especial pleasure in operating for urinary calculus, and he always used the lithotome cache double of Dupuytren. He had often expressed the hope that he would not die a lingering death. This hope was realized, for when the final summons came, he was about to go down stairs to begin his daily round of work, when he fell to the floor, expiring at once. Although no autopsy was perfonned, it was understood that a faint- ing fit Iiad caused him to fall, striking his fore- head violently upon the floor, and causing cere- bral hemorrhage. His death caused sincere mourning in many a home. Robert A. McLean. Sketch of his life, written by Mr. A. Phelps after the doctor's death. Kecol. of pers. commun. during the last ten years of his life, when the writer was associated with him in practice and in college and hospital work. Trans. Amer. Med. .Assoc, Phila., 1880, vol. xxxi. pp. 1090-1093. San Francisco West. Lancet, 1881-81, vol. in, pp. 49-53. Portrait. Tolmie, William Fraser (1812-1886). Born at Inverness, Scotland, and educated in Glasgow, from which university he held his L. S. P. and S.. he left Scotland for America in 1832, in the service of the Hudson's Bay Company, coming around Cape Horn on a sail- ing vessel and arriving at Fort Vancouver on the Columbia River, then the chief trading post of the company, in the spring of 1833. In T834 he joined the expedition under Mr. Ogden, which traded along the Northwest coast as far as the Russian boundary, establish- ing trading posts at different points for the Hudson's Bay Coinpany, and after five years as surgeon in Fort Vancouver he visited his native land, and the following year was placed in charge of the Hudson's Bay Company's posts on Puget Sound. He took a prominent part during the Indian war of 1855- 56 in paci- fying the Indians, being an excellent linguist. Dr. Tolmie was known to ethnologists for his contributions to the history and linguistics of the native races of "the west coast. In 1884 he published, in conjunction with Dr. G. M. Dawson, a nearly complete series of short vocabularies of the principal languages inet with in British Columbia. He retained to the