Page:American Medical Biographies - Kelly, Burrage.djvu/725

NAME LINCOLN 703 LINCOLN leading all in medical instruction. Moreover, in their haste for money, they cut prices of tickets and the cost of board for students in their re- spective villages, and in lieu of cash, accepted notes on demand, payable after the students had gone into practice, and earned enough to pay. Nor was it ever denied, though pub- licly charged, that many students paid the graduation fee of $25 as a bribe for a di- ploma to practise after a single year of study, nor that one institution was founded by a single physician, who named himself profes- sor, and obtained for his students from a "Pa- tron College" in another state diplomas of medicine, "plenty of which were growing wild on the Kennebec River above tide water in the wilds of Maine." Finally, such men tried later on to seduce from Burlington the only faithful colleague of Dr. Lincoln, with the idea of closing its doors forever, when Lin- coln went on to Baltimore, as will next be seen, to lecture on his favorite topics. Bitter as was such treatment, it became worse when Dr. Lincoln, after the death of John Doane Wells in 1830, was invited to Baltimore. There he gave delightful courses on anatomy, comparative anatomy, and on the brain and the nervous system to the satisfac- tion of the faculty and numerous students alike. When invited, at the end of the cours- es, to repeat them another year, and to con- sider himself as a candidate for a professor- ship in the LTniversity of Maryland Medical School, he declined because his painful neu- ritis, which had continued off and on since 1820, prevented him from taking so long a journey again. This declination was publicly seized upon by his opponents, and perverted into a story of his complete failure as a lec- turer, so that he was at last compelled, in self defense, and as proof of his position as a lecturer, to print for everyone to read the invitation of the faculty and classes at Balti- more to repeat his lectures and to consider himself as a candidate for the vacant profes- sorship of anatomy and surgery. So, too, when in another year he went to Bowdoin and lectured in the place of the lamented Wells, his opponents in Vermont sneered at him for deserting, like any rat, the sinking ship at Burlington. Arriving in his native village. Dr. Lincoln bravely endured the remainder of his life. He did a little practice, driving around in his chaise, being helped in and out by loving hands. He gave a few public health talks and iUustrated them with pictures of his own. He finally developed a curious mental condi- tion, in which conversation or the reading of newspapers became distasteful in the highest degree, while he could still spend hours en- joying the most abstruse mathematical prob- lems. He gradually failed with all the symp- toms of tuberculosis, and died February 26, 1835, in his thirty-third year. In that short life, he had accomplished much, but had fallen short of his medical ideals. He longed to improve medical education by compelling every student to be a college graduate, to pass a careful entrance examination and to spend three years attending lectures, which were to be free, and paid for by the State. Those who were not college graduates were to be examined for fitness and compelled to study five years. Students in Vermont were to at- tend all three of the licensed schools for in- struction, one year in each, and the faculties of all of them were to be improved b}- choos- ing men who had been examined for capabil- ity in lecturing and teaching clinically. No student was to receive a diploma of medicine or the state certified right to practise without an examination by a board from all three of the institutions. In order to prevent the scan- dal of degrees being sold for the graduation fee to students of limited study, the exact amount of instruction obtained by each stu- dent was to be legally certified. This promis- ing plan was never tried. Closely examined, it still offers food for thought, and seems to be, even now, an advance in medical education. The lesson taught by the life of this young physician is, that even if the ideals longed and striven for are never reached, the influ- ence, exerted upon the profession and upon the commimity in which one lives, counts in one way or another in the end. James A. Spalding. Lincoln, David Francis (1841-1916) David F. Lincoln, hygienist and author, was born at Boston, January 4, 1841. The son of William Lincoln, he was of Pilgrim descent; his education was received at the Boston Latin School and at Harvard College where he took an A. B. in 1861. Going on to the medical school he was granted an A. M. and an M. D. in 1864. Eighteen months before graduation Dr. Lincoln served as acting assistant surgeon in the United States Navy. After taking his degree he spent a like period in study at the universities of Berlin and Vienna and then settled in practice in Boston, making a spe- cialty of nervous diseases. Following the year 1881 he lectured and did literary work at Hobart College, Geneva, N. v.. returning to Boston in 1894, and living there until his death, October 17, 1916, at the