Page:American Medical Biographies - Kelly, Burrage.djvu/1263

NAME WILLIAMS 1241 WILLIAMS a good deal of his land to the town for a park, and for putting up a church and school house. The church was afterwards changed into a hall, while the school house was often used as a church in which young Dr. Appleton officiated when parsons were scarce. Dr. Williams was a pioneer in that part of tht' country, did much work in the outlying districts, and had an excellent reputation as physician and surgeon, doing his operations with poor instruments and no anesthetics. The exact date and month of his death are unknown, but he seems to have died suddenly in 1799, leaving a good memory for kindness and for trying to make his patients believe that his successor. Dr. Appleton, would do even bet- ter for them than he himself had done. J.MES A. Spalding. Waterville Centenary, Dr. F. C. Thayer. Williami, Stephen West (1790-1855) Stephen West Williams, medical biographer, second son of Dr. William Stoddard Williams of Deerfield, Massachusetts, and a lineal de- scendant of Rev. John Wilhams, the first minister of that town, was born in Deer- field, March 27, 1790. The family fur- nished many eminent physicians to New England, and Stephen early showed a studious turn of mind. When sixteen he had read the five volumes of Rush's "Enquiries," "Darwin's Zoonomia," Thornton's "Medical Extract" in five volumes, and other lengthy works, and two years later began an appren- ticeship in medicine under his father. Like Rush, he early formed the habit of taking notes on matters that particularly interested him and in this manner and by reporting cases in the medical journals acquired facility in writing. His first medical publication was an account of the two remarkable cases of suicide of the brothers Clap, which was published by Rush in his "Diseases of the Mind," and subsequently quoted by Esquirol in his works on insanity. In the winter of 1812-13 he attended a term of lectures at Columbia College by Post, Hosack, Mott and others, and in 1813 settled as a doctor in Deerfield, practising there until he moved in 1853 with his family to Laona, Illinois. In his early years he practised sYir- gery, but later in life devoted himself to an extensive consultation practice. He became a member of the Vermont State Medical Society in 1815, and of the Massachusetts Medical So- ciety in 1817. In the latter he was an influen- tial member, being orator at its annua! meeting in 1842, with a scholarly address, "Medical History of the County of Franklin in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts." He was instrumental in the formation of the Franklin District Society, one of the branches of the Massachusetts Medical Society, in 1851. In 1816 he published a volume on the indig- enous plants of Deerfield and its vicinity and subsequently wrote numerous papers, which were published in the periodicals of the day upon the medicinal properties of plants. In 1817 he read a "Traditionary and Historical Sketch of the Aboriginal People of the Tountry" before the New York Historical Society published in the Society's Transac- tions." From 1823 to 1831 he held the chair of medical jurisprudence in the Berkshire Medi- cal Institution and in 1838 delivered a course of lectures on the same subject in the College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York, supplying a chair made vacant by the illness of Professor Beck; subsequently for two years he served as lecturer upon medical botany and jurisprudence in Dartmouth College (1838-40) and professor of materia medica, pharmacy and medical jurisprudence in Willoughby University (1838-53), during this period deliv- ering over four hundred lectures, carefully written out in full. Dr. Williams' most noted work was his modest, dun-colored octavo of some 400 pages on American Medical Biography, published in Deerfield, in 1845, in which he continued James Thacher's pioneer biographical writing in a manner most satisfactory to the student of early medicine, at the same time showing a more careful regard for facts than Thacher. Previous to this he wrote an "Indigenous Medica! Botany of Massachusetts" and a "Catechism of Medical Jurisprudence," and in 1847 appeared the "Genealogy of the Williams Family in America." Many more of his writings are to be found in the medical jour- nals of the time. A list of his published minor works is in .'Mlibone's "Dictionary of Authors." Dr. Williams was the author of the first re- port of the American Medica! Association on medical biographies and the originator of a practice on the part of the Association of col- lecting biographies of deceased medical men of the country who had attained prominence. In 1824 the Berkshire Medical Institution gave him her M. D., and in 1829 Williams College made him an Honorary A. M. He was an honorary- member of the New York Historical Society, the Royal Society of Antiquarians at Copenhagen, the State Medical Society of Wisconsin. Dr. Williams was simple and unostentatious