Page:American Medical Biographies - Kelly, Burrage.djvu/1202

NAME VAUGHAN 1180 VAUGHAN "Why should the man meet death, in whose garden salvia groweth?" So far as a hundred other medical books of Vaughan are concerned, I say in brief : that each is copiously annotated for use. Where he sees something important, he underscores it in ink; where of more than transitory value, it is underscored twice, and where an item is of great value to a busy man, he calls attention to it with three inky fingers in the margin. Then, he goes over each book thoroughly, makes a good index (in addition to the one already provided) and pens it, either in the next to the front page of the book, or at the end, and then writes on the front page, just where his own index is to be found. Two of Vaughan's books are annotated in a short hand, which I regret my inability to decipher. The first characteristic of Dr. Vaughan as elucidated from these marginal notes, is his erudition. Seeing a false quotation from Hippocrates and a misleading translation, he inserts the genuine text and translates it ac- curately. Reading a Latin book "On the Plague at Marseilles," he corrects false Latin- ities. Studying the "Life of Cornaro," an Italian who lived to be more than a hundred, he inserts Italian phrases, and thumbing a treatise in French, on the same plague at Mar- seilles, above noted, he argues from literary evidence concerning the anonymous author and names him as a certain Bishop of Mar- seilles. Amongst the English medical friends of Dr. Vaughan, mention may be made of Adair Crawford, celebrated for his experiments on animal heat; of John Hunter, many of whose experiments Vaughan carried on at Hallowell ; Dr. Thomas Percival of Manchester, an early agitator for prison sanitation ; Dr. Charles White, the famous obstetrician, very success- ful in his campaigns against puerperal fever, and others long forgotten. He was also inti- mate with Mrs. Barbauld, the famous poetess, and his political acquaintance was nothing less than immense. Judging from copious notes on drugs. Dr. Vaughan must have been a man who treated patients according to the therapeutic resources of the day. He was outspoken on temperance, not total abstinence, but real temperance, and mentions that the temperance of Dr. Cheyne with his quart or three pints of wine a day for thirty years was not unlike the guzzling of the Ancients who knew nothing of distilled liquors but got drunk on wine. He mentions also the death of Person, the great scholar, a personal friend of his, from alcoholic poison due to small beer. He emphasized the opinion of John Warren that measles sometimes erupts first on the velum palati, and is vexed that "Guides to Health" say nothing about the care of the teeth, for on their diseases other bodily diseases depend. Regretting that space forbids further quo- tations from the medical books of Vaughan, I will sum up his medical career to this effect: He was interested in medicine from the date of his student days at Edinburgh ; he never forgot its attractions. In the scattered popu- lation in and around Hallowell he practised for twenty years, importing books from Lon- don up to 1820, when he turned his attention more to literary work. He was at this time about 65 years of age, and was glad to impart his medical knowledge to younger men in medicine, needing its practice as a means for a livelihood. What a pity, last of all, to think that from his facile pen no autobiography ever appeared ! What reminiscenses of the past on participants in the French Revolution, on Eng- lish politics, and on world-wide medicine were for that reason lost forever. James A. Spalding. Vaughan, John (1775-1807) John Vaughan, physician and tractarian, born in Upland, Chester Count}-, Pennsylvania, June 25, 1775, was the son of John Vaughan, a Baptist minister. He received his classical education at Old Chester, then studied medi- cine with William Currie (q. v.) and in 1793- 1794 attended lectures at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1795 he settled in Christiana Bridge, a village in Delaware, in 1799 moving to Wilmington, Delaware, where he acquired a large practice. In the winter of 1799-1800 he gave a course of lectures on chemistry and natural philos- ophy delivered in the town hall of Wilming- ton ; he was a corresponding member of the Philadelphia Academy of Medicine, honorary member of the Medical Society of Phila- delphia, member of the Medical Society of Delaware and Fellow of the Philosophical Society of Delaware. Among his friends were Jefferson, James A. Bayard, John Dickerson, C. A. Rodney, and Aaron Burr ; among physi- cians Benjamin Rush, Charles Caldwell, Ed- ward Miller, Samuel L. Mitchill and James Tilton. Deeply religious from his youth he felt called to preach, began this service and con- tinued, when free from medical duties, until his death. Vaughan was a "zealous advocate" of metal- lic tractors and wrote "Observations on Animal Electricity, in Explanation of the tl