Page:American Medical Biographies - Kelly, Burrage.djvu/665

NAME JONES 643 JOYCE ever known. He seemed to possess instinctive- ly the faculty of discerning the hidden cause of disease, and applying with promptness and decision peculiar to himself the appropriate remedies." He left one son, Walter, when he died on his plantation in Northumberland Count}-, Vir- ginia, December 31, 1815. Medical Men of the Revolution, J. M. Toner, 1876. Appleton's Cyclop, of Amer. Biog., N. Y., 1887. Jones, William Palmer (1819-1897) William Palmer Jones, alienist, was born in Adair County, Kentucky, October 19, 1819, son of William Jones, of Lincoln County, Ken- tuckj', whose ancestors were Welsh. His mother was Mary, daughter of Robert Pow- ell, a Virginia farmer and a major in the American Revolution. Left a widow with nine children, she cared for them with great devotion until she died in 1851 at the age of forty-five. He early determined to study medicine and was an editor of the Southern Journal of years, then had a course of lectures at the Louisville Medical College, afterwards receiv- ing an M. D. both from the Medical College of Ohio and the Memphis Medical College. In 1840 he began to practise in Edmonton, Kentucky, but the same year moved to Bowl- ing Green, Kentucky; in 1849 he settled in Nashville, Tennessee, where he remained un- til the close of his life. In 1852 he established the Parlor Visitor; he was an editor of the Southern Journal of Medicine and Physical Sciences and also of the Tennessee School Journal. He helped in founding Shelby Medical College (1858), where he was professor of materia medica; from 1862 to 1869 he was superintendent of the Central Hospital for the Insane near Nashville, one of the first insane asylums in the country for the colored race. He married Elizabeth J. Currey of Nash- ville in 1851. In 1876 Dr. Jones was elected president of the Nashville Medical College and was made professor of psychology, medicine and mental hygiene in that institution. He served in the State Senate and introduced the law providing equal educational advan- tages for children of all races. Dr. Jones died at his home in Nashville, September 25, 1897. Institutional Care of the Insane in the U. S. and Canada, Henry M. Hurd, Baltimore, 1916-1917, vol. iv, 432. Phys. & Surgs. of U. S., W. B. Atkinson, Phila., 1878. Appleton's Cyclop, of Amer. Biog., N. Y., 1887. Joyce, Robert Dwyer 1823-1883) Robert Dwyer Joyce was born in Limerick County, Ireland, in 1828. The Joyce family, from which Robert Dwyer Joyce was descend- ed, had established itself not far from the city of Limerick, and at the time of the poet- physician's birth was living in Glen Oisin. Dr. Joyce received his early education at an ordinary country school and Queen's College, Cork, and after teaching for some time studied medicine in the same city. During this period he dipped into poetry occasionally and there was a clear pre-figurement of his future poetic career. In the Dublin Freeman's Journal we read of him : "During the interval between 1857 and 1865 he lived first in Cork and afterwards in Dub- lin, and supported himself partly by writing and partly by the prizes and scholarships of the college, for he never competed for a schol- arship he did not win." For a time, while in Dublin, he devoted him- self to medical practice, as far as it came to him, and to medical study while still continu- ing to devote himself to literature. He was professor of English literature at the prepara- tory college of the Catholic University in Dublin. He seems to have realized that the oppor- tunities open to him in Ireland were rather limited, in his profession at least, and accord- ingly when about thirty-five he came to this country and settled in Boston, and it was not long before he had acquired a good practice, when he set himself once more to the cultiva- tion of literature. His first venture of any ambition was a volume of "Ballads, Songs and Romances." In the meantime he had written a prose work called "Legends of the Wars in Ireland." Some of these charming old poetic legends introduce historical matter of consid- erable importance. On the other hand, some of them reflect his professional interest. "Ros- aline, the White," for instance, is the kind of pseudo-medical story with which Conan Doyle began his career as a writer of fiction. Joyce'i real triumph as a literary man did not come until the publication of "Deirdre, an Irish Epic." About three years after "Deirdre" a second long poem entitled "Blanid" was pub- lished. This was his last work. It was pub- lished in 1879, when its author was in his fifty-second year, and further works of even higher order were confidently anticipated from him by his friends. Dr. Joyce's health began seriously to fail about the middle of the year 1882. He died October 24, 1883. Margaret K. Kelly. Abridged from a biography by James J. Walsh.