Page:American Medical Biographies - Kelly, Burrage.djvu/791

NAME MATTHEWS 769 MAURY was published. It consists of a collection of the poems written by Dr. Matthews, edited by Walter Hurt, and with a foreword by James Whitcomb Riley, who was a close personal friend and admirer of the author. Dr. Matthews numbered among his friends many of the most famous literary persons of his time, and they have placed a very high esti- mate on the quality and value of his verse. He was well known as "The Poet of the Prairie." His poems indicate a deep sympathy with the country, the sky, the woods and flowers, the rivers and prairies. The experiences of a gen- eral practitioner of medicine are also reflected in the deep insight into and sympathy with human feelings and suffering as well as pleasures. Some of his poems have direct medical interest. Dr. Matthews was married in 1878 to Luella Brown, and in 1896 to Madeline Wright. He had three children, William V. and James R. by his first marriage and Courtland Wade by his second. He died of pneumonia at Mason, Illinois, March 7, 1910. George H. Weaver. The Mason News, March 17, 1910. Tempe Vale and Other Poems, Chicago, 1888. The Lute of Life, Cincinnati, 1911. Matthews, Washington (1843-1905) Washington Matthews having lost his mother in early infancy, his father, a physician, brought him while still a child to the United States and settled in Dubuque, Iowa. Young Matthews studied medicine under his father and later attended lectures at the University of Iowa, where he obtained his M. D. in 1864. In the same year, entering the Army of the United States, he served as acting assistant surgeon until the close of the Civil War. In 1868 he was promoted to the rank of cap- tain, and in 1889 to that of major. During a great part of his military life Matthews was on duty at various army posts in the West. Coming in contact with many Indian tribes, he became deeply interested in Indian eth- nology and philology, and wrote numerous articles on anthropological subjects, among which may be mentioned : "The Human Bones of the Hemenway Collection," "Myths of Gestation and Parturition," "On Measuring the Cubic Capacity of the Skull," etc. A volume of "Navaho Legends" was published in 1896. Matthews died at Washington, D. C, April 29. 1905. Albert Allemann. Physicians and Surgeons of America, I. A. Wat- son, Concord, N. H.. 1890. Maury, Frank Fontaine (1840-1879) F. F. Maury, a rising surgeon, teacher, and first in America to do gastrotomy, was born in Danville, Kentucky, August 9. 1840, the son of a clergyman, the descendant of Huguenot stock. He passed through Centre College, Danville, in 1859, and attended a course of lectures at the University of Virginia, and then went to complete his medical course at the Jefferson Medical College, Philadelphia, where he gradu- ated in 1862, and settled in Philadelphia. He served for a time in a military hospital and then began to devote all his energies to surgery. He was made lecturer on venereal and cutaneous diseases in his alma mater, and a surgeon to the Philadelphia Almshouse (Blockley). He was chief of the clinic of the elder Gross, and a surgeon to the Jeflferson College Hospital. He did the first American gastrotomy on June 25, 1869, the tenth recorded case, on a man dying from a syphilitic stricture of the esophagus (Sedillot's operation, 1849) ; the patient, in extremis at the time of operation, died immediately after (see Am. Jour. Med. Sci.. 1870, p. 365). On October, 1873, he excised the left brachial plexus of old Davy, who was an extreme sufferer from multiple neuromata of the shoulder ; the case had been described the previous year in the same jour- nal by Duhring. The outcome was a paralysis of the arm and a failure to give adequate relief, as the writer recalls. He reported in the American Journal of the Medical Sciences for January, 1878, in con- junction with C. W. Dulles, a remarkable series of cases in which "Kelly the Bum," a tramp and professional tattooer, had infected large numbers of men in various cities, by mixing his pigments with his saliva as he injected them under the skin in his decorative efforts. Twenty-two cases were studied, and the de- termination was reached that saliva con- taminated by mucous patches is contagious, as well as the secretions of the secondary lesions ; a warning is also given against the indiscriminate use of common utensils. He operated four times for exstrophy of the bladder, and twice for extirpation of the thyroid gland. In conjunction with Duhring he edited the Photographic Review of Medicine and Sur- gery for the two years of its existence. He was an impressive lecturer, and gay 'and at- tractive to young men ; but unfortunately held the utterly lax moral code common in his day. He died on the fourth of June, 1879, two weeks after his wife, who died of a sudden acute peritonitis, leaving two children. Howard A. Kelly. New York Med. Jour.. 1879, vol. xxx, 223. Phila. Med. Times, 1879, vol. Ix, 468.