Page:American Medical Biographies - Kelly, Burrage.djvu/582

NAME HORWITZ 560 HOSACK geon April 19, 1861, commissioned medical in- spector March 3, 1871, medical director, June 30, 1873, and was retired with relative rank of captain in 1884. His office as assistant to the Bureau of Medicine and Surgery during the war involved the adjustment of all pensions that accrued to the wounded and the widows and orphans of the killed in the Navy ; the tabulation of medical and surgical statistics and the general management of all financial matters pertaining to the office. Dr. Horwitz projected and constructed the Naval Hospital in Philadelphia. The history of this institution presents one of those anomalies so common in the past his- tory of the Navy. The law establishing special hospitals for the treatment of the sick of the Navy provided that at one or more of them an asylum should be maintained for the superan- nuated or infirm of the Navy and for those permanently disabled by reason of wounds. The building purchased for this double pur- pose was the old Pemberton mansion on the Schuylkill River near the high road leading into the city from the south and it was first of all a naval hospital and so used for seven years as prescribed by law and replaced the hospital previously established in the Navy Yard. It was purchased by Surgeon Thomas Harris, U. S. Navy, by order of the Secretary of the Navy, in 1826, at a cost of $16,000.00. Friction naturally occurred between the offi- cer commanding that portion assigned as an asylum or home and the doctor in charge of the hospital. When a Naval Academy was also placed on the same reservation, the com- plications increased. A partition was built be- tween the hospital portion of the building and that assigned as a home or asylum for the de- crepit, but the varying number of patients and the necessity of accommodating them made this barrier somewhat of a figment. Fortu- nately in 1842 an epidemic of small-pox led to the transfer of the Naval Academy to Annapolis. In 1883 the special building to be used as an asylum was completed and some of the . legitimate hospital patients were moved into it as it was proposed to use it for both classes of beneficiaries. The asylum was first under the cognizance of the Bureau of Medicine and Surgery but in 1849 was transferred to that of Yards and Docks and later passed to the Bureau of Navigation. The Civil War entailed a need for increased hospital facilities and in March, 1864, Congress appropriated $75,000 for an extension of the Asylum to be used for hospital purposes. The following year an additional appropriation of $100,000 was secured for "accommodation for the sick, wounded and otherwise disabled at the Naval Asylum." The building was not completed until 1868 and as the demands made by the war were then greatly reduced it was prophesied that it would, in time, be turned over to the Asylum proper. Such has not been the case and be- tween 1908 and 1918 the buildings have been constantly renewed and enlarged. In 1918, by order of the Secretary of the Navy the Naval Hospital, Philadelphia, was removed from the jurisdiction of its offspring, the Naval Home (or Asylum), and the medical officer commanding it is now under the commandant of the whole Naval District. Dr. Horwitz's work as assistant to the Bureau during the Civil War and later as Chief of the Bureau of Medicine and Sur- gery was of signal value to the medical de- partment and to the service at large. For years Doctor Horwitz had been a suf- ferer from chronic rheumatism and his death, September 28, 1904, at Bar Harbor, Maine, was due to myocarditis with valvular complications. W. C. Braisted. Hosack, Alexander Eddy (1805-1871). The elder Hosack (David Hosack) (q. v.) seems to have been so anxious for his little son, Alexander Eddy, to become a student that it is said he "neglected no opportunities that could afiford facilities to enlighten his mind." Unfortunately the boy Alexander, born in New York City on April 6, 1805, was at nineteen "so enfeebled in con- stitution by close application to books'' that his attention for some time had to be turned to the restoration of health. Dr. Aydlott and a Mr. McFarland "watched over the early men- tal growth" of Alexander, and by 1824 he had recovered health and graduated M. D. at the University of Pennsylvania with a thesis on "Senile Catarrh." For the following three years he stayed in Paris, working under Du- puytren, returning to New York with a keen interest in his work and a mind well calcu- lated to weigh fairly all new theories. He introduced Syme's operation for exsection of the elbow into the United States. In 1833 he invented an instrument for the purpose of rendering the operation for staphylorrhaphy more complete in its minutix and was re- warded by universal praise from his confreres. Hosack operated twenty-three times for stone;