Page:American Medical Biographies - Kelly, Burrage.djvu/1197

NAME VANDER POEL 1175 VAN DE WARKER i Vander Poel, Samuel Oakley (1824-1886) Samuel Oakley Vander PocI came of a fam- ily long distinguished in the affairs of New York. His father also was a physician at Kin- derhook, Columbia County, New York, which was the doctor's birthplace on February 22, 1824. Ho took a course at the University of the City of New York, of which Theodore Frelinghuysen was then chancellor, then re- turned home, and for a while studied medicine with his father. This prepared him for en- trance to Jcfifcrson Medical College, i'l Phila- delphia, from which he graduated in 1845. The ensuing two years he passed with his father, and in 1847 went to Paris. In 1850 he came home and settled in Albany, where he married. ^'ander Poel had acquired a large practice when, in 1857, Governor King appointed him on his staff as surgeon-.general. In 1860 he became president of the Albany County Medi- cal Society. The duties of surgeon-general had been barely more than nominal during Governor King's administration, but in 1861, when Governor Morgan selected him for that place on his staff, the requirements and re- sponsibility of the position vere great. After the war he resumed private practice and in 1867 was chosen to the chair of general pa- thology and clinical medicine at the Albany Medical College, and was elected president of the State Medical Society, in 1870. While still devoted chiefly to his private practice. Gover- nor Hoffman appointed him in 1872 health of- ficer for New York. Quarantine matters were then in a deplorable state, and Dr. Vander Poel's powers of organization were again called into play. During his term he filled, in 1876, the chair of the theory and practice of medicine in the Albany Medical College. In 1883 he was elected to a professorship of public hygiene in the University of New York, and had an LL. D. from there in 1884. Dr. Vander Poel wrote many articles for medical journals, eight of them reprinted. He died in Washington, on March 12, 1886, while on the way South for his health, Med. Rcc, N. Y., 1886, vol. xxix. .lbany Med. Ann.. 18S6, vol. vii. Tr.ans. Med. Soc. N. Y., Syracuse. Portrait in Surg.-Gen.'s Lib., Wash.. D. C. Van de Warker, Ely (1841-1910) Kl- 'an dc Warker, gj'uecologist, was born in West Troy, New York, November 27, 1841. He had his early education at a private school under Mr. Arthur, father of Chester A. Ar- thur, President of the United States. He at- tended the Troy Polytechnic, and later had medical training at the Albany Medical Col- lege. On graduation he entered the 162nd Regi- ment of the New York Volunteers and served as surgeon until the close of the Civil War, attaining the rank of major. He began prac- tice in Troy, New York, in 1865, and in the same year married Louise Gardner of Han- cock, Massachusetts, who died the following year. He moved to Syracuse about the year 1870 and in 1872 married Helen A. Adams of that city who lived until 1907. In 1908 Dr. 'an de Warker retired from active practice on account of failing health, and died September 5, 1910. He was sur- vived by two dau.ghters and three grand- children. Van de Warker should be reckoned among the pioneers in American Gj'uecology as he spent a particularly useful life in diffusing the benefits of modern surgery over a wide area of middle New York. One of the found- ers and most active members of the American Gynecological Society, he was also for a con- siderable time a prolific writer and zealous in promoting the advance of his specialt)' from that stage which it occupied in the 70's and 80's to its present status. His writings for the most part appear in the "Transactions of the American Gynecological Society," the Ameri- can Journal of Obstetrics and the New York Medical Journal. He was particularly force- ful and happy as a writer, and the Gynecolo- gists of his day well remember the great interest excited by the elaborate consideration of the "Mechanical Treatment of Versions and Fle.xions of the Uterus, " a theoretical and practical study of the pessary, which is to be found in the "Gynecological Transactions" for 1883. The paper which excited most attention was "A Gynecological Study of the Oneida Com- munity" {American Journal of Obstetrics, New York, 1884). He also wrote on the "Treat- ment of Extrauterine Pregnancy by Electri- city" a much mooted subject ,at that time. His literary interests "W"ere not confined to a specialty alone, as he wrote a paper on the "Abandoned Canals of the State of New York" illustrated by seven artistic photographs which appeared in the Popular Science Monthly, Septemlier, 1909. He also wrote a book of 225 pages entitled "Woman's Unfitness for Higher Co-education," December, 1903, written when he was Commissioner of Schools at Syracuse, New York. But he really began his work a decade too early to take any active part in the working out of the larger problems of gy-necologic sur-