Page:American Medical Biographies - Kelly, Burrage.djvu/73

BACKUS conferred." In the spring of 1864, just after finishing the revision, he was attacked by typhoid fever, which carried him off on the nineteenth of March.

As a writer, during the ten years he acted as co-editor of the North American and Surgical Journal, he contributed many and valuable articles besides editing three important chemical works and writing largely for the "American Cyclopedia of Medicine and Surgery," edited by Dr. Isaac Hays.

Besides the appointments named he was vice-president of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, member of the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Science and for two years president of the American Philosophical Society.



Backus, Frederick Fanning (1794–1858)

Azel Backus, D. D., was a staunch old divine of Connecticut whose sternness was only equalled by his philanthropy, and his son Frederick Fanning, settling down as a general practitioner in Rochester, then numbering three hundred and thirty-one inhabitants, was a chip of the old block and took the burden of woes physical, spiritual and civic on his own shoulders determined to make things better. He was born on the fifteenth of June, 1794, and graduated from Yale College at nineteen, in 1813, taking his M. D. from the Medical College of New Haven in 1816, and two years later marrying "a lady of cultivated mind," one Rebecca, daughter of Col. William Fitzhugh of Maryland.

His chief merit lay in his indefatigable efforts on behalf of the insane. His reports on their neglected condition laid the foundation for the Asylum at Syracuse. No one had done much before this and when his efforts had gained some measure of success he retired from the Senate to a damaged practice. In 1858 he had a second attack of paralysis following one two years previously, and on November 4 he died, leaving his wife, his daughter and four sons a small competence.



Bacon, David Francis (1813–1866)

David Francis Bacon, physician and writer, was born at Prospect, Connecticut, November 30, 1813, and died at New York City, January 23, 1866. He graduated at Yale in 1831 and at the Yale Medical School in 1836. Soon after graduating he was sent as principal colonial physician to Liberia by the American colonization society. During the greater part of his life he lived in New York, and was actively interested in politics. He was a frequent contributor to periodical literature, and published "Lives of the Apostles," New York, 1835, and also "Wanderings on the Seas and Shores of Africa," 1843.



Bacon, Francis (1831–1912)

Francis Bacon, son of Leonard Bacon, D. D., LL. D., and Lucy Johnson Bacon, was born in New Haven, October 6, 1831. After a preliminary education at the Hopkins grammar school he entered the Yale Medical School where he finished his course in 1851, but did not receive his degree on account of his youth until two years later. In 1852 on the outbreak of a yellow fever epidemic in Galveston, Texas, he volunteered as an assistant surgeon to the Galveston Hospital, and remained there for a year and a half when he was stricken with the fever himself. He then returned home, but was recalled six months later to take entire charge of the same hospital and there continued for eight years. At the end of this time, as civil war seemed inevitable and he possesedpossessed [sic] abolitionary views, he resigned and settled in New York City for the practice of medicine. On the death of the inventor Charles F. Goodyear, to whom he had been a personal medical attendant, he removed to New Haven and practised there until he enlisted as assistant surgeon in the Second Connecticut Infantry. While occupying this position he was especially commended for his devotion to the wounded under hot fire at the Battle of Bull Run. When the three months' term of enlistment of that regiment had expired, he re-enlisted as surgeon with the rank of major in the Seventh Connecticut Volunteers, which, like the earlier Second, was under the command of Colonel Alfred H. Terry. Subsequently he was at the Siege of Pulaski, at Beaufort, Tybee Island and in other engagements, and finally was promoted to be medical inspector of the Army of the Potomac. Shortly thereafter he was made director general of the medical department of the Gulf, having charge of all the Union hospitals in the South. He was elected in 1864 to succeed Jonathan Knight as professor of surgery in the Yale Medical School, and continued in this position until 1877, when he resigned to devote himself entirely to the practice of his profession. In 1899 he returned to the Medical School as lecturer on medical jurisprudence and held that position until his death.