Page:American Medical Biographies - Kelly, Burrage.djvu/270

NAME COOLIDGE 248 COOPER ened the action of the heart and produced an accumulation of blood in the vena cava and large veins. The congestion principally affected the liver. Largely because of this he favored the use of calomel. He was credited with saying, "If calomel did not salivate, and opium did not constipate, there is no telling what we could do in the practice of physic." It is interesting to note that one holding such views could become the successor of Daniel Drake and continue so for a number of years. In spite of strong opposition to these doc- trines from outside quarters, to which were added, as time passed, opposition within his school, he continued so to teach until he was pensioned by the faculty on the request of the students. As an extreme example of his therapy, he administered thirteen tablespoonfuls of calomel in a case of cholera in the course of three days. The case terminated fatally, but he repeated the same in another case with a happier ending. He died October 19, 1853, of some chronic pulmonary disease, and in his last illness he bled himself copiously and purged himself thoroughly with calomel. He wrote : "Account of the Inflammatory Bilious Fever Which prevailed in the Summer and Fall of 1804 in the County of Loudoun. Virginia," 1805 ; "A Treatise on Pathology and Therapeutics," 2 vols., 1828; "Essays on the Autumnal and Winter Epidemics," 1829. August Schachner. The Life and Writings of John Esten Cooke, by Lunsford P. Yandell, American Practitioner,, July, 1875. Coolidge, Richard Hoffman (1820-1866) Born in Poughkeepsie, New York, Richard Hoffman Coolidge, surgeon of the United States Army, studied medicine in New York and was commissioned assistant surgeon in the army in 1841. During the Mexican War he was assistant medical purveyor. In 1849 he was assigned to duty in the surgeon-general's office at Washington. Here he compiled the "Statistical Report on the Sickness and Mor- tality in the Army of the United States from 1839 to 1855" and the "Army Meteorological Register," published in 1855. He was also one of the co-editors of the American edition of Beck's "Medical Jurisprudence." In 1860 he was promoted to the rank of surgeon and appointed medical inspector in 1862, rendering meritorious services on the battlefields of South Mountain, second Bull Run, Gettysburg and Resaca, and in 1865 he was ordered as medical inspector of the department of North Carolina to Raleigh, where he died in the fol- lowing year. Coolidge was a modest and courteous gentleman, loved by all his fellow officers. Albert Allemann. New York Med. Jour., 1866, vol. ii. Trans. Amer. Med. Asso.. Phila., 1867, vol. xviii. Cooper, Elias Samuel (1822-1862) Elias Samuel Cooper, surgeon and founder of the first medical college on the Pacific coast, was born in Somerville, Ohio, in 1822, a brother of Dr. Esaias Cooper of Galesburg, Illinois. He began to study medicine at the age of si.xteen in Cincinnati, Ohio, and re- ceived his M. D. from the St. Louis Univer- sity, Missouri, first practising medicine in Dan- ville, Illinois, but moving to Peoria in 1844. He was president of the Knox County, Illinois, Medical Society in 1853 and spent the year 1854 visiting various European clinics. In 1855 he went to San Francisco, and in 1856 was instrumental in organizing the Medical Society of the State of California. He founded in San Francisco, in 1858, the first medical college on the Pacific coast, known as the Medical Department of the Uni- versity of the Pacific, which was afterwards reorganized as the Medical College of the Pacific and later as Cooper Medical College by his nephew Dr. Levi Cooper Lane. In 1860 he began publishing the San Francisco Medical Press, a quarterly journal of medi- cine and surgery, edited after his death by Dr. L. C. Lane and Dr. Henry Gibbons. Most of his published writings appear in this jour- nal and in the Northwestern Medical and Surgical Journal, the California State Jour- nal of Medicine (1856) and the "Transactions of the Medical ^ciety of the State of Cali- fornia" (1858). Cooper was a bold, enthusiastic and original surgeon who, soon after his arrival in San Francisco, gained a reputation as a daring operator by a sensational operation in which he successfully removed a breech-pin of a fowling piece from beneath the heart. He announced a number of new surgical principles of which the following may be men- tioned : 1. "Atmosphere admitted into joints or other tissues is not a source of irritation or injury except where it acts mechanically as in veins, the thorax, or in the abdomen, reducing tem- perature."" 2. "The only true mode of treating ulcera- tion of bone within a joint is to lay the joint open freely, keeping it open by packing with lint." . 3. "Opening of joints early in case of infec-