Page:American Medical Biographies - Kelly, Burrage.djvu/1254

NAME WIDMER 1232 WIESENTHAL Wickes, was granted land in Huntington, Long Island, in 1660. Graduating from Union College in 1831, the next year Stephen Wickes was a student of natural sciences at Rensselaer Poly- technic Institute at Troy, New York, and m 1833 entered the Medical Department of the University of Pennsylvania, receiving an M. D. in 1834. In 1835 he practised in New York City, then moved to Troy, New York; in 1852 he settled in Orange, New Jersey, and became identified with the medical life of the state and an authority on its medical annals. Af- ter 1861 he edited the "Transactions of the New Jersey State Medical Society" and gave the annual reports on current medical history of New Jersey. He edited also the -'Old Tran- sactions" of the state medical society, 1766- 1800, and out of this grew his history. In 1873 he became physician to Memorial Hospital at Orange. He was a ruling elder in the Presbyterian Church for twenty years and president of the Essex County Bible So- ciety in 1873. He wrote the "History of Medicine in New Jersey and of Its Medical Men to A. D. 1800," a notable book of 449 pages which took five years to prepare and was published in 1879. Part I contains the history of medicine and Part II biographical sketches of New Jersey physicians to A. D. 1800. In 1834 Union Col- lege conferred an A. M. 'upon him ad eundem and in 1868 Princeton did the same. In 1836 Dr. Wickes married Mary Whitney, daughter of Isaac Heyer, of New York; in 1841, he married Lydia Matilda, daughter of Joseph Howard, of Brooklyn, New York, and widow of William H. Van Sinderen, a phy- sician. He died at his home in Orange on July 8, 1889, having placed posterity greatly in his debt by the labor spent in gratifying what Sidney Lee calls the "commemorative instinct." Med. News, Phila., 1889, Iv, 47. Phys. & Surss. of the United States, V. B. At- kinson, 1878. Appleton's Cyclop. Amer. Biog., N. Y., Ib88. Widmer, Christopher (1780-1858) Christopher Widmer was one of the clever young army surgeons whom warfare caused to settle in a new coimtrV. He had taken his membership and fellowship degree at the Lon- don Royal College of Surgeons and joined the Fourteenth Light Dragoons as surgeon when the war of 1812 broke out and he was sent to Canada and elected to stay in Toronto (then York) when peace was declared. The recognized leader of the profession, the life and soul of the General Hospital, he gave to the earlier practitioners of the province an enormous impulse towards scientific surgery, and was equally skilled in surgical diagnosis and in operative technic. In 1833 he founded and was the first president of the Medical and Chirurgical Society of Upper Canada, and was also a member of the Upper Canada Med- ical Board from its first meeting in ISW, until his death, being chairman after 1823. In person he resembled Lord Roberts, though his military service had not engendered a per- fectly controlled temper, and he had a lurid gift in the use of expletives when things did not go right. But he was just and honorable and full of charity for the poor. He was twice married: the first union an unhappy one, the second not ideal because of wide difference in social rank. His death was tragic. Deeply affected b' the loss of a much loved son he walked to the cemetery and faint- ed on the grave, and though promptly carried home he never quite recovered consciousness and died the following morning, May 2, 1858. N. Albert Powell. Wiesenthal, Andrew (1762-1798) Andrew Wiesenthal, anatomist, the only son of Dr. Charles Frederick Wiesenthal (q.v.), of Baltimore, was born in the year 1762. Having received a good education in his na- tive city, he began to study medicine in his father's private school, then studied anatomy under Shippen and attended lectures in Phila- delphia and London. He spent three years in the latter city, 1786-1789, as interne in St. Bartholomew's Hospital, studying under John Sheldon, Cruikshank, John Marshall, and Per- cival Pott. Returning to Baltimore in the summer of 1789, shortly after the death of his father, he began instruction, the ensuing win- ter, in anatomy, physiology, patholog}', opera- tive surgery and the gravid uterus, to a class of fifteen. He attempted, with Dr. George Bu- chanan (q.v.), to foiuid a medical college, but while he failed in this, he continued instruction in anatomy and surgery in his private school up to the time of his death, which occurred in Baltimore December 2, 1798. In 1789 he married Sarah Van Dyke, of Eastern Shore, Maryland. They had one son, Thomas Van Dyke Wiesenthal, who became a physician in the United States Navy. In the London Medical and Physical Jour- nal, vol ii. No. 8, October, 1799, it is said that Andrew made an important pathological discovery in Baltimore, in 1797. The account of it is conveyed in a letter from him dated May 21, 1797, and it is sent to the editors of the above journal for publication by "Andrew Marshall, Bartlet's Building, September 10, 1799." The discovery was that the deadly epi-