Page:American Medical Biographies - Kelly, Burrage.djvu/148

BORCK particularly interested in his surroundings, he would quietly step one side and gather an entirely new species. His studies in later years were mostly among the grasses, mosses and algae. His collections along these lines are now incorporated in the herbarium of the Rochester Academy of Science.

One of the greatest charms of Dr. Booth's home was his garden, in which many of our rare native plants were induced to grow and bloom. One rare and interesting specimen which he raised and of which he was very proud, is a large tree, a hybrid between the English Walnut and the Butternut. This tree has attracted the attention of many botanists, and Prof. Charles S. Sargent, of the Arnold Arboretum, Boston, once paid it a visit.

In character, Dr. Booth was one of the most unassuming of men, gentle, quiet and retiring, enjoying to the utmost the freedom of his country life, with its flowers and its fruits and its opportunities for unostentatious deeds of kindness. His neighbors speak of him lovingly as one of the best of men, a reminder of Thoreau, and to many of his friends he will ever be an exponent of the simple life.

A sketch of Dr. Booth was published in the Proceedings of the Rochester Academy of Science, Vol. 5, pp. 39–58.



Borck, Mathias Adolph Edward (1834–1912)

Mathias Adolph Edward Borck, surgeon, was born in Hamburg, Germany, April 18, 1834, son of a German surgeon. His mother, to whom he was indebted for his primary education, was a Dane. At the age of eleven he secured in competition a free scholarship in the Hamburg Gymnasium. During the war between Denmark and Germany, involving Schleswig-Holstein, he served as a volunteer dresser in the military hospital, and after the war returned and graduated in 1851, when he left for America to settle in Baltimore, Maryland, supporting himself for a time by teaching caligraphycalligraphy [sic]. After acquiring some English he entered the University of Maryland, graduating in medicine in 1862. While studying medicine under Nathan R. Smith, Samuel Chew and Edward Dwinnelle, he practised minor surgery and dentistry.

He was an assistant surgeon and surgeon in the United States army 1863–1864. He went with General Banks on the Red River expedition, and was post-surgeon under General Granger. Taken with typho-malarial fever, he resigned at New Orleans and returned to Baltimore and on his recovery moved to Hancock, Maryland, where he practised until 1868. After another brief sojourn in Baltimore he went to Paducah, Kentucky, in 1869, and in 1872 to St. Louis, Missouri, where he practised and sat under the lectures of John T. Hodgen in the St. Louis Medical College. Here he received an additional degree in 1874. One of the organizers of the College for Medical Practitioners of St. Louis, he was professor of surgical diseases of children there, 1882–1884; he was a capable post-graduate teacher.

Borck was the first surgeon to advocate and practise the subcutaneous division of the capsule in hip disease in the second stage, the stage of serous or synovial effusion. He wrote on fracture of the femur, abjuring straight splints, and he carried his reports of his ovariotomies on from a single case in 1878, up to fifty in 1885, with five deaths, to one hundred cases in 1895.

In 1884 he went as delegate to the eighth International Medical Congress at Copenhagen and remained abroad to study. He attended, also, the tenth Congress at Berlin, in 1890.

He was an artist with the brush, the Marion Sims Medical College having many of his double life-size anatomical paintings, and he was a skilful pianist.

Married in 1854, his widow, Dr. Henrietta Stoffregen Borck, survived him.

He died in St. Louis Jan. 20, 1912.



Botsford, Le Baron (1812–1888)

The Botsfords were an old family who emigrated from Leicestershire, England, to Newton, Connecticut, where they became both eminent and wealthy. Amos Botsford, the grandfather of Le Baron, graduated at Yale in 1763 and was a tutor at the college in 1768, when he espoused the royalist cause. At the conclusion of the War of Independence, he with five hundred other loyalists sailed from New York for Annapolis, Nova Scotia, and he finally settled in WestmorelandWestmorland [sic] County, New Brunswick. His son William, the father of Le Baron, graduated at Yale and studied law, afterwards being made a judge of the supreme court.

Le Baron was born in Westmoreland County, New Brunswick, in 1812, and began studying medicine in Glasgow in 1831, graduating there in 1835. After practising four years in Woodstock, New Brunswick, he removed to St. John, where he remained until his death in 1888.

In 1854 a terrible epidemic of cholera broke