Page:American Medical Biographies - Kelly, Burrage.djvu/1302

YOUNG expert botanist and well versed in natural history. He followed not only the curriculum at Gorham Academy in Maine, but he gave public lectures on botany and natural history. During two vacations he established a natural history society at Bangor, lectured on related topics, and oddly enough, had for one of his listeners an older and celebrated man, (q.v.).

When about nineteen, Young made the acquaintance of Parker Cleveland, chemical professor at Bowdoin, and at his suggestion attended lectures on medicine and chemistry at the Bowdoin Medical School.

From time to time he consulted various specialists concerning his deafness and in 1841 saw (q.v.), of Boston, a famous man in his day.

After studying two years at the Bowdoin Medical School, 1840–1841, he obtained letters of proficiency, and set off in the fall of 1842 for medical lectures at the Jefferson Medical College, Philadelphia. As he journeyed he consulted the eminent aurists of the day, and was by them in turn puked and bled and blistered and setoned, and scraped in his pharynx, but to no avail, for he remained perpetually deaf.

Mention should be made of his intimacy with (q.v.), professor of chemistry at Harvard, and murderer of his friend, Dr. Parkman. Many letters passed between them on sulphuric ether, others discussed gun cotton, the new explosive. Agassiz was also interested in and corresponded with Young.

I have never been able to discover positively that Aaron Young obtained a diploma from Jefferson College, but judge from the fact that on his arrival in Boston in 1875 he became a fellow of the Massachusetts Medical Society, that he must have had the diploma and the documents to prove his right to practise medicine.

Provided with the proper instruments for examining and treating diseases of the ear, Young settled in Maine. He became so discouraged with the question: "Why don't you cure yourself of your own deafness?" that after a year he threw away all the apparatus he had for ear treatment, and settled in Bangor as a druggist in company with (q.v.), one of the famous men of Maine, who also kept a drug store.

For four years, until about 1848, Young continued his studies in medicine and botany and natural history; collecting an herbarium and a mineralogical cabinet, and made such progress that he was known all over the country, and in Europe, as a botanist, keeping up a wide correspondence with learned men at home and abroad.

He was appointed State Botanist of Maine in 1848, and for two years giving up business and medical practice, composed a now rare work on the Flora of Maine, reviewed by Gray in the American Journal of Art and Sciences, but of which no copy has come to light in late years. Whether it was a book or a collection of pictures, or simply a hortus siccus with indigenous plants of Maine, pasted to large sheets of paper, can unfortunately not be discovered from the extended notice by the learned botanical professor at Cambridge.

As the botanist of Maine, Young explored the coast and the interior extensively, and made one of the very early ascents of Mount Katahdin. The Maine Farmer for 1848 contains a report of this expedition, the report being a valuable piece of literary work. This was the first time that afforestation was ever advocated in Maine; had it been adopted, we should now be reaping its manifest wide benefits.

The Maine legislature did not see fit to grant another term to Young at the high price of $600 and traveling expenses, so he tried to make a living by teaching at South Paris, where he explored the mines, afterward famous for tourmalinstourmaline [sic], with success. From here, he corresponded with the British specialist Harvey, on seaweeds and sea-dredging, and with Berkeley on fungi, edible and poisonous.

Another curious episode about this time was the proposal from an artist who had lost his voice, for Young to lecture on botany and natural history, whilst the artist showed to the audience his handsome pictures painted from life. Wearied of teaching, in 1850 Young established himself as a physician in Auburn and Lewiston, kept a drug shop, and gradually extended one of his own prescriptions into a famous cough syrup, sold as a patent medicine known as Dr. Young's "Catholicon." He set up in print, edited, and wrote every word of all the editorials, city notices and gossip, and even the advertisements in three newspapers all by himself. Although his papers, one entitled The Farmer and Mechanic, another The Pansophist, and