Page:American Medical Biographies - Kelly, Burrage.djvu/76

BAKER anatomy which was divided after his death between the library of the surgeon-general's office and the medical library of McGill University. He had a set of lantern slides selected from the earlier books, generously lent on occasion.

Dr. Baker was of goodly height and presence. His fine head was remarkably like that of some of the great anatomists of the past, notably Quain and Sir Richard Owen. He had a lively sense of humor and his pleasant, affable, quizzical ways endeared him to all. As a teacher he believed that the proper place for instruction is the dissecting room; his lectures were humanistic, historical, morphological, of ample scope, set off by demonstrations on the cadaver, which he performed himself. After the death of Dr. Robert Fletcher he was probably the most erudite physician in Washington. In his early days, while in the government service, he was intimate with Walt Whitman and John Burroughs.

Dr. Baker married Mary E. Cole of Sedgewick, Maine, in 1873; she survived him with six children, one of whom, Colonel Frank C. Baker, served in the Great War.

He died at his home about September 30, 1918.



Baker, Samuel (1785–1835)

Samuel Baker, pioneer in the upbuilding of Baltimore as a medical centre, and founder of the library of the Medical and Chirurgical Faculty of Baltimore, was born in Baltimore, Oct. 31, 1785. His father, William Baker, emigrated from Germany when young and married a wife of Irish extraction.

At the age of fifteen Samuel went to the Chestertown academy under Dr. Ferguson. He next entered the apothecary shop of Dr. Henry Wilkins to gain a practical knowledge of pharmacy, and later became a pupil of Drs. Littlejohn and Donaldson. The winters of 1806–7 and 1807–8 found him in attendance on the medical lectures in the University of Pennsylvania, and graduating in the latter year with a thesis on chorea.

In 1808 Baker married Sarah, a daughter of the Rev. John Dickens.

Returning to Baltimore to practise he became professor of materia medica in the Medical College of Baltimore 1809–1833, secretary of the Medical and Chirurgical Faculty 1809–1813, founder of the library of the Medico-Chirurgical Faculty in 1830, and founder and president of the Medical and Chirurgical Faculty of Maryland in 1830. He was dean of the University, 1829–1830. The records state that "the disease which proved fatal was so illusory that but little apprehension was felt for him until a day or two prior to his dissolution. He died at the ripe age of 50," Oct. 16, 1835.



Baker, William Henry (1845–1914)

William Henry Baker's title to recognition lies in his having brought the new specialty of gynecology from the Woman's Hospital in the State of New York to Boston in 1875, and there for twenty years teaching it to the students of the Harvard Medical School both by lectures, as professor of gynecology, and by clinics at the Free Hospital for Women, which he founded on the general plan of the parent hospital. The facts of his life are these: He was born on March 11, 1845, at Medford, Massachusetts, the son of Rev. Abijah R. Baker, D. D., a Congregational clergyman, and of Harriet Woods, daughter of Rev. Leonard Woods, president of Andover Theological Seminary. His early education was received at Atkinson Academy, N. H., which he left at the age of eighteen to enter business in New York City. Here he prospered so that at the end of six years he was able to carry out a cherished ambition, to study medicine. After receiving an M. D. from Harvard Medical School in 1872 he served as a surgical interne at the Boston City Hospital, and took a like appointment at the Woman's Hospital in the State of New York, then situated at Forty-ninth Street and Lexington Avenue. Association with Sims, Emmet, Peaslee and Thomas inspired Baker to carry their ideas to new fields and arriving in Boston he was appointed on the staff of the Boston Dispensary where he demonstrated that gynecology could be taught to students in a public clinic, in spite of the opposition of many of the older members of the profession, who held that it was immodest and that the public would never permit such instruction.

In 1875 he raised what would now seem a small fund of money with which he founded the Free Hospital for Women in a dwelling house in East Springfield street, near the City Hospital, developing the institution by donations from his private patients and friends, whose loyalty he took great pains to preserve by constant favors and by his winning personality, until the hospital finally occupied its beautiful building on the Boston Parkway in the town of Brookline.

Baker was a shrewd business man, a