Page:American Medical Biographies - Kelly, Burrage.djvu/74

BAGBY Majestic in figure, a scholar in thought and action, and possessed of a graceful English diction he soon became eminent in his profession, being especially well known as a surgeon and as an alienist. He was president of the New Haven County Medical Association in 1875, 1880 and 1881 and served as president of the Connecticut State Medical Society in 1887 and 1888. For thirty years he was a director of the New Haven Hospital and also served as one of its visiting surgeons. He with his wife founded the Connecticut Training School for Nurses and continued his interest in it until his death. He was president of the New Haven Anti-Tuberculosis Association from its organization in 1902, and served as a member of the Connecticut Board of Pardons from the time of its creation in 1883 until 1910. He was one of the organizers of the American Public Health Association. In 1906 the honorary degree of Doctor of Sciences was conferred upon him by Yale University.

For recreation he loved to dip into the writings of Sir Thomas Browne and was one of the best informed scholars on him and his works. Upon the tercentenary of Browne's birth, a celebration was held at his birthplace in Norwich, England, and at this time Doctor Bacon was invited to deliver one of the addresses. It is very much to be regretted that the address upon Browne, which he prepared at this time, was never printed. His address on the occasion of the centennial celebration of the New Haven County Medical Association on January 26, 1903, unfortunately has shared a similar fate. The quality of his published writings make us wish that he had written more.

He married June 6, 1867, Georganna Muirson Woolsey who actively aided him in all his philanthropic work until her death in 1906. He died at his home in New Haven, April 26, 1912, of angina pectoris after an illness of several weeks.



Bagby, George William (1828–1883)

George William Bagby, first a practitioner of medicine, then writer of editorials, lecturer, and eminent man of letters and essayist, was born in the heart of Virginia, in the county of Buckingham, on August 13, 1828. His father, George William Bagby, was a merchant of Lynchburg, Virginia; his mother was Virginia Young Evans. He was educated at Princeton, New Jersey, and at Delaware College in Newark, Delaware, under John S. Hart. At the end of his sophomore year, when eighteen, he began to study medicine, taking his degree at the University of Pennsylvania (1849) offering a thesis on "Hysteroptosis."

He began to practise in Lynchburg, Virginia, on the site of the present Opera House, but, as Thomas Nelson Page says, "the pen was much more grateful to his hand than the scalpel … and he soon began seeking in the nearest newspaper the expression of his dreams. His first article to attract attention was a paper on Christmas, an editorial in the Lynchburg Virginian.

"All his life much of his work was thrown into the devouring maw of the daily press. His latest essays as among his first, were papers which passed for letters or editorials but were really literary essays which were masked under these ephemeral names.… They gave him local celebrity but nothing more.

"He is set down in a recent biographical encyclopedia merely as 'Physician and humorist;' he was much more than this—he was a physician by profession; a humorist by the way; but God made him a man of letters.

"Among all Virginia's writers few have had the love to feel, and the gift to portray, Virginia life as Bagby had. He was the first to picture Virginia as she was.… When the old life shall have completely passed away, as all life of a particular kind must pass, the curious reader may find in George W. Bagby's pages, pictured with a sympathy, a fidelity and an art, which may be found nowhere else, the old Virginia life precisely as it was lived before the War, in the tidewater and southside sections of Virginia.… He first of all discovered that in the simple plantation homes was a life more beautiful and charming than any that the gorgeous palaces could reveal."

Page also says of "The Old Virginia Gentleman," that it was "to my mind the most charming picture of American life ever drawn."

Bagby was interested in the Lynchburg Express, soon defunct; he wrote for Harper's Magazine, for the New Orleans Crescent, the Charleston Mercury, the Richmond Despatch, the Southern Literary Messenger and sometimes for the Atlantic Monthly, as well as for The Sun (Baltimore) and New England through the Back Door.

In the Civil War he enlisted as a private, but was detailed by Beauregard for clerical work at headquarters. He did a vast amount of literary work and corresponding during this period. After the War he sought in New