Page:American Medical Biographies - Kelly, Burrage.djvu/244

NAME CLAIBORNE 222 CLARK Macon College, graduating A. B. in 1848, and receiving his M. A, in 1851. He entered the University of Virginia in 1848 and graduated in medicine in 1849, then attended lectures at the Jefferson Medical College, Philadelphia, and took his M. D. from that school in 1850. He was a member of the Gynecological So- ciety of Boston ; a fellow-elect of the Victoria Institute of Great Britain; and was one of the founders of the Medical Society of Vir- ginia and its president in 1878. He was also a member of the Southern Surgical and Gyne- cological Association and of the Tri-State Medical Association of the Carolinas and Virginia. Claiborne began to practise in Peters- burg, January 1, 1851. In 1855 he was elected to the lower house of the State Legis- lature, and in 1857 was elected a state senator, and served in that body until the beginning of the Civil War, when he was eventually com- missioned major and surgeon, and assigned to duty with the twelfth Virginia Infantry. In May, 1861, while in the field, he was elected to the senate, and on December 1, 1861, was ordered by the secretary of war to take his seat. This he did, but immediately resigned and was given the duty of organizing and equipping general hospitals, chiefly in Peters- burg, Virginia. In June, 1864, being the senior surgeon of the post, he was appointed execu- tive officer and chief surgeon of all the mili- tary hospitals in Petersburg and vicinity. He was a very able man. Not only was he a most skilful physician, but a man of broad general information and experience. He married Sarah J. Alston, of North Caro- lina, in May, 1853, and had four daughters and a son, John H. Claiborne, Jr., who be- came a physician and practised in New York City as an ophthalmologist. In November, 1888, he married his second w'ife, Anne L Watson, of Virginia, and had one son and a daughter. After a sudden illness of a few days' dura- tion, he died on February 24, 1905, in Peters- burg. He made some valuable contributions to medical literature, and besides published an interesting and valuable book of reminiscences entitled, "Seventy-five Years in Old Virginia." A valuable publication of his having a pro- fessional character is "Reports from Private Practice." Robert M. Slaughter. Physicians and Surgeons of America, Irving A. Watson. Concord, N. H., 1896. Clark, Alonzo (1807-1887) Two little incidents give the key to the character of this original thinker who had an inward assurance of his own powers. His father, not rich, offered him $1,000 to com- plete his education, and the lad said he would work his own way through. When growing old he was asked to retain the presidency of the College of Physicians and Surgeons, New York, but firmly declined, showing the same resolution in leaving oflf as in beginning. The father who offered his savings was one Spen- cer Clark, a leather merchant of Chester vil- lage, Vermont, which he had founded and where Alonzo was born March 1, 1807. The boy got his education at the village school in Worthington ; the Hopkins Academy at Had- ley, and under Parson Hallock of Plainfield, finally taking his bachelor's degree in 1828 from Williams College, Massachusetts. The discipline of teaching school fell to his lot as to that of many young doctors in order to pay the way. In 1835 he took his M. D. from the College of Physicians and Surgeons of New York. After visits to London and Paris he was back in New York keen on pathology and microscopic studies, the microscope being then rarely used for professional purposes. Some years spent in the wards and dead house of Bellevue Hospital gave him a power of diagnosis and a knowledge of morbid pro- cesses, and his opinion gradually came to be valued by the physicians of the city and coun- try. In the class-room his knowledge of his subject, his scholarly methods, commanded attention. Among his contributions to the advancement of medicine may be mentioned: verification of percussion, his management of typhus fever, and his treatment of peritonitis by opium. The idea of the first originated with Dr. Camman and he with Clark and Dr. C. T. Mitchell set to work to prove the prin- ciples of percussion by post-mortem experi- ments. Upon the dead body success was com- plete and in his papers Clark gives instances of their results in diagnosing rare cases of disease. His management of typhus fever by remov- ing the window sashes even in winter, by heat- ing the incoming air and by maintaining the strictest cleanliness in his ward at the Bellevue Hospital, rapidly diminished the mortality. Then, as to peritonitis he dismissed venesec- tion, leeches and mercurials and came to the conclusion that "a kind of saturation of the system with opium would be inconsistent with the progress of the inflammation and would subdue it," a conclusion demonstrated in h»