Page:American Medical Biographies - Kelly, Burrage.djvu/1303

YOUNG a third The Touchstone, were small weekly sheets, they show evidences of a vigorous mentality and entitled Young to a high position in newspaper literature.

I may add, parenthetically, that finding a few copies of The Touchstone at Bowdoin College Library, and a few others in Wisconsin, I tried in vain to bring them together, but finally succeeded in securing typewritten copies from the west, so that the curious can consult a complete file of The Touchstone at Brunswick, Maine.

He finally established himself in Portland, as an ear surgeon, in 1858, and did a good business for a while, but lacked persistence. In another year, as one born under the Bands of Orion, he moved to Farmington, Maine, and there issued a marvellous pamphlet entitled "The Franklin Journal of Aural Surgery and National Medicine;" a copy is in the Surgeon-General's Library at Washington. He insists upon diseases of the naso-pharynx as causes of ear diseases, discharges and deafness; he discusses how to remove foreign bodies from the ear, gives the tests for hearing, and reveals a case list suggestive of over 1,000 patients first and last. This unique pamphlet ends with a delightful picturesque and satisfactory eulogy of the late Professor Parker Cleveland of Bowdoin, a model biography, and one in which Carlyle would have reveled for piquancy and human color.

During 1859 and '60 Young traveled through Maine as an aural surgeon. From Bath, he wrote to the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal an account of the way to illuminate the ear, and from Rockland another "On Various Cases of Ear Disease," accepted by that journal as from "Dr. Aaron Young, Jr., Farmington, Maine." Amongst the curious cases mentioned are double mastoid fistula, exfoliation of the ossicles, artificial ear drum for relief of deafness, and the removal of a pea.

At the time of the Civil War Young was practising in Bangor as an aurist and having always been a talker, he talked altogether too much on conciliating the South, on paying the slave-holders for their property, and wrote similar papers in the public press, until he became known as a Copperhead, although Hon. Hannibal Hamlin continued to befriend while warning him. Finally, public spirit was aroused, the Bangor Whig office was sacked and gutted, and there was a rumor that harm would be done to Young if he did not stop talking. Warned in season and fearing reprisals, and ruin, he fled to the Provinces and there for four years practised as an aural surgeon, writing papers of popular value on the ear, nose and throat, and on deafness and its cure; it would seem that he had offices for practice in St. John, New Brunswick; Halifax, Nova Scotia; St. John's, Newfoundland, and one or two other places. Finally, wearied of living out of the United States, he appealed to Hon. Hannibal Hamlin to give him a chance to come back to Bangor where he agreed to keep still, but Hamlin did better than this, for he obtained for Young the consulate at Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, where for some years he did good official service, wrote marvelous consular reports on the harbor, the channels, botany, public health, agriculture, epidemics, the people, and corresponded frequently with the Smithsonian Institution and sent home wonderful specimens from Brazil—insects, birds and minerals. Then he was ousted, as happens often in republics to the best of men; regretfully he had to come home. He would gladly have stayed for life but the politicians were against him—somebody found out (after twelve years of perfect service) that he was deaf and could not hear complaints! He settled next in Boston in 1875, was elected a member of the Massachusetts Medical Society, and spent the rest of his life trying to be an ear surgeon, but was not successful because he was ageing fast, his hearing was worse, new men were coming in, and, in fact, he had had his day. He invented an instrument to assist hearing.

At the request of (q.v.), he wrote on "The Effect of Alcohol on Inhabitants of the Tropics," he experimented with Dr. Bowditch at the Massachusetts General Hospital on oxygen gas, wrote on "antidotes for strychnia poisoning," "on quackery" and "sale of patent medicines in Brazil." He had pneumonia in 1892, but survived, then again in 1898 from which he died, January 13, 1898, at the age of seventy-nine.

Young worked in many directions; he first classified ear diseases in Maine, but was abused by some physicians as an "Eclectic;" by others as a patent medicine seller. As the writer all by himself of one of the very earliest ear journals, as the first regular ear surgeon, and as a writer of many medical papers of historical value, he is clearly worthy of being held in remembrance.

