Page:American Medical Biographies - Kelly, Burrage.djvu/381

NAME ELLIS 359 ELLIS and Lycoming Counties, Pennsylvania; his mother was Mercy Cox, highly thought of as a preacher in the Society of Friends. He en- tered the Medical School of the University of Pennsylvania in 1820 and graduated M. D. April 14, 1822, with the thesis "Marsh Ef- fluvia.'' He was elected one of the physi- cians of the Philadelphia Dispensary. He practised in Philadelphia, but his claim in medicine lies in the authorship of "The Medical Formulary," which passed through eleven or more editions ; later editions were revised and extended by Dr. Samuel George Morton (q. v.), and by Dr. Robert Pennell Thomas (q. v.). In 1827 Ellis became profes- sor of materia medica in the Philadelphia Col- lege of Pharmacy, succeeding Dr. Samuel Jack- son (q. v.), and held that chair until his death. He was co-editor of the Journal of the Phila- delphia College of Pharmacy, of which he was a founder, from 1829-1831. On June 2, 1824, he married Amy H., daughter of Ellis Yarnall, a merchant of Philadelphia ; there were no children. Benjamin Ellis was one of eleven children; a brother was Charles (1800-1874), fourth president of the Philadelphia College of Phar- macy, 1854-1869, and president of the Amer- ican Pharmaceutical Association 1857-1858. After an illness of about a week from scarlet fever Benjamin Ellis died in Philadelphia April 26. 1831. ^wmc Jordan. Private information. Jour, of Pharmacy, 1832, vol. iii, 345-352. B. H. CoQtes. EUii, Calvin (1826-1883). Calvin Ellis, a lineal descendant in the seventh generation of the Ellises who were founders of Dedham in 1634, was born in Boston, August IS, 1826. After a good school education in Boston, Ellis entered Harvard College, where he graduated in the class of 1846. He used to say that during his college life he "played," and that he first awoke to the full meaning of life when he studied medicine. He grad- uated from the Harvard Medical School in 1849, and the same year was appointed house- pupil at the Massachusetts General Hospital. After two years in the hospitals of France and Germany, where he devoted the greater part of his time to clinical medicine, morbid anatomy and pathology, he returned to his native city and became assistant to J. B. S. Jackson (q. v.), professor of pathological anat- omy at the Harvard School. He was also made admitting physician and pathologist to the Massachusetts General Hospital. On April 25, 1863, the corporation appoint- ed Ellis adjunct professor of the theory and practice of physic. After being associated with George C. Shattuck (q. v.) for two years in this place, he was transferred to the depart- ment of clinical medicine, and on Octiber 20, 1865, was made adjunct professor to Henry I. Bowditch (q. v.), whom he succeeded on Sep- tember 28, 1867, as professor of clinical medi- cine. He was now a visiting physician to the Massachusetts General Hospital. Two years later he was chosen dean of the medical school and held this office till June 25, 1883, when the school moved into its new building. Ellis was unquestionably one of the most valuable teachers the Harvard Medical School had. He showed that we must place the diagnosis of disease upon a scientific basis; he scouted mere authority. Nothing was to be regard- ed settled until proven. "Snap" diagnoses were beneath his notice, and so-called intui- tion in diagnosis was to him little less than charlatanism. He was dean of the medical school in the reformation period, and the newly elected president of the university, Charles W. Eliot, found in him a leader ready and able to carry out reforms in that department of the university where custom, tradition, and per- sonal interests seemed strong enough to de- feat any new move. He lived to see success assured. Not so with his life work on "Symp- tomatology." It must be one of our keenest regrets, as it is a loss to medicine that this last work was not left in form for publica- tion. But many of his writings survive. A full list includes some forty-two articles pub- lished, mostly in the Boston Medical and Sur- gical Journal and the American Journal of the Medical Sciences, between 1855 and the year of his death. His Boylston prize essay in 1860 on "Tubercle" was considered perhaps the best paper on that subject prior to Koch's discovery of the bacillus. Ellis became a fellow of the American Acad- emy of Arts and Sciences on November 9, 1859, and was a distinguished member of that learned body at the time of his death. Dur- ing the Civil War he went twice to the front upon errands of mercy, and twice returned a victim to the infection from which he tried to rescue others. His generous bequests to the school so faith- fully executed by his sister were as helpful in a material manner as his teaching to the intellectual side of student life. The trustees of the Massachusetts General Hospital wanted him for visiting physician