Page:American Medical Biographies - Kelly, Burrage.djvu/1188

NAME TULLY 1166 TULLY Tully, William (1785-1859). William Tully was born at Saybrook, Con- necticut, November 18, 1785. Althougb he was a delicate boy, and a poor scholar in arith- metic, he graduated from Yale College with honors at the age of twenty-one (1806). He then began to teach school in his native town, and to study medicine during his spare time. His medical instructors were Dr. Mason Fitch Cogswell (q. v.), who founded the asylum for the deaf and dumb in Hartford ; Dr. Nathan Smith (q. v.), the great surgeon who, begin- ning at Dartmouth, established several medical schools and taught in three or four at the same time ; Dr. Samuel Carter, of Saybrooke, and Dr. Eli Ives (q. v.) of New Haven, whose bo- tanical garden of medicinal herbs so interested Tully that he made materia medica his spe- cialty, often taking more time to botanize and combine drugs than to attend to patients. This fondness for chemistry and botany, together with a natural irritability of temper, and an air of superiority in his relations with patients and colleagues, made it difficult for Tull}' to obtain a good practice readily, so that after receiving his license to practise in Connecticut, in 1810, he practised, in six towns during the following eighteen years. The first of these "locations" was Enfield, where he fell in love with Mary Potter, a doc- tor's daughter, marrying her in 1813, and tak- ing her to Milford to make a home. Here his talents were slowly recognized, and botanical studies were not lucrative, so that, dissatisfied with his emoluments, Tully once again moved, this time to Cromwell, in 1815. Success in gaining patients there, and in making friends with his coleagues brought him an invitation to settle in Middletown, one of the largest cities of the State, in 1818; the following j-ear he was given an honorary degree of M. D. from the Medical School at Yale, then five year;; old, and from that time Tully's abilities never failed of recognition and appreciation. In 1820, while in Middletown, Tully published his first long medical article, an essay on hydrophobia and its alleged cure by Scutellaria. This was published in the Middlesex Gazette, and con- tained 7,400 words in fine print, addressed with ill-concealed sarcasm to such physicians as accepted hearsay evidence as to the value of drugs without scientific proof of the accuracy of the statements. In 1823, in collaboration with Dr. Thomas Miner (q, v.) he published a volume entitled "Essays on Fever." The great- er part of this work concerned the thirty-five cases of yellow fever which occurred in the Connecticut Valley in 1820, with a dis- cussion of the impossibility of finding a cause for the contagiousness of any fever, and an enumeration of the specific remedies for each disease in doses which now seem heroic, such as seventy grains of tartar emetic in typhus, one thousand grains of calomel in the early stage of yellow fever, and whiskey in unlimited amount, from a quart to a gallon in twenty- four hours. In explanation of this dosage, Tully says, "Neither weight nor measure is to be at all regarded until there is an alleviation of the disease." His ordinary dose of opium was seven or eight grains in a day, or a tea- spoonful of laudanum every half hour "to keep the calomel from running off at the bowels.'' He also advocated Fowler's solution as a tonic in the case of half a drachm three times a day, but he frequently denounced the uni- versal phlebotomies. It is small wonder that Tully's colleagues chafed under his self-assumed superiority, and his criticism of their methods, but he became so irritated at their controversial attitude that he decided to leave Middletown, and therefore moved to East Hartford in 1824, where he had many friends, including his former teacher, Dr. Cogswell, and Dr. Eli Todd, to whom he had been of great service in founding the Hart- ford Retreat for the Insane. He remained there only two years, however, before moving to Albany, where he entered partnership with Dr. Alden March (q. v.). This move was due to the fact that he had accepted the presidency of the Vermont Academy of Medicine, at Cas- tleton, together with the "settee" of materia medica and theory and practice of medicine. Three years later he also accepted an invitation to fill the same chair at the Yale Medical School, made vacant by lire resignation of Dr. Eli Ives. For fourteen years Tully continued to teach at both these places, lecturing for fourteen weeks each year to classes which numbered more than were to be found in any other medical school in New England. In 1828 Tully moved with his family to New Haven. His wife, though an invalid, bore him eleven children, of whom the four who lived to grow up, were educated in New Haven, their home for twenty years, notwithstanding the fact that Tully, indignant because of the criticism of one sort and another, had handed his resignation to the authorities of the Medi- cal School every year. In 1841, however, probably to his complete surprise, the resig- nation was accepted ; and as he had already resigned from his position at Castleton, and had refused a call to the University of South Carolina, in 1833, and had rejected a tenta-