Page:American Medical Biographies - Kelly, Burrage.djvu/799

MEIGS of Diseases of Children in Cornell University Medical College. Dr. Winters based his little book on the Feeding of Infants practically entirely on Dr. Meigs' work, and ended it by saying:	"Meigs' discovery, when fully appreciated by physicians and mothers, will be the means of saving more lives than any other discovery made by medical science during the nineteenth century, as it will affect more or less, the life and health of every child born into the world."

In the long interval between the publication of Dr. Meigs' work on milk analysis in the early eighties and his return to the subject in 1908, he published a number of articles on scientific subjects, as well as his two books, "The Origin of Disease," and "Human Bloodvessels in Health and Disease." During this period he was particularly interested in the histology and pathology of the arteries and capillaries, and he made the interesting discovery that the capillaries of the heart actually enter the heart muscle fibres. His son and biographer, Edward B. Meigs, says: "I well remember his intense interest in the preparation of the illustrations for his books, which he always considered the most important part of them. He did most if not all the histological work himself and his patience and success with technical matters of this sort always aroused my greatest admiration. When it came to the question of making pictures of his specimens for publication, he went into the matter in the most thorough way—would spend many hours with Mr. Hermann Faber and his son, who made the drawings, and acquired a detailed knowledge of the different methods of reproduction."

He was very fond of nature and of outdoor life and had a remarkable knowledge of trees and plants. It was seldom that he missed an opportunity to drive in the afternoon, or to go out in a boat when he was by the sea.

He had a very sure judgment of human character, and there is reason to believe that this quality gave him a large, though quiet, influence in the selection of men to fill responsible positions in the many institutions to which he belonged.



Meigs, Charles Delucena (1792–1869)

Charles Delucena Meigs was the fifth of the ten children of Josiah Meigs, sixth in descent from Vincent Meigs who came from Dorset, England, and settled in Connecticut about 1647. He got his middle name from his mother's brother, Charles Delucena Benjamin, who had been named for a Spanish gentleman, a friend of his father, Col. John Benjamin of Stratford, Conn. Charles was born February 19, 1792, on the island of St. George, Bermuda, where his father, a Yale graduate, had gone to practise as a proctor in the courts of admiralty. The father soon tired of his work, returned to New Haven and was elected professor of mathematics and natural philosophy at Yale. In 1801 his father had to superintend the erection of the buildings of the University of Georgia and the whole family finally settled in Athens, where Charles went to the grammar school and learned French from Petit de Clairvière, a cultivated emigré. He graduated at the University of Georgia in 1809 and began that same year to study medicine under Dr. Thomas Fendall, serving as apothecary boy and being sent out to cup and leech by his master. He took his M. D. degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1817.

After his marriage to the daughter of William Montgomery, a cotton merchant in Philadelphia, he settled to practise first in Augusta, but afterwards in Philadelphia, quickly obtaining, not practice, but the intimacy and esteem of men like La Roche, Hodge, Bond, Bache, Wood and Bell. He was one of the first editors of The North American Medical and Surgical Journal (in 1826), and found time to translate and publish Velpeau's "Elementary Treatise on Midwifery," and seven years later he issued his "Philadelphia Practice of Midwifery." a work showing the bent of his mind to be towards obstetrics. In 1837 with Drs. Gerhard, Houston and Ryan, he was appointed by the College of Physicians to act with a committee of the trustees of the estate of Dr. Jonas Preston to found the "Preston Retreat."

Meigs drew special attention to cardiac thrombosis as a cause of those sudden deaths which occur in childbed and previously generally attributed to syncope. In this connection T. Gaillard Thomas says: "It has been remarked that Meigs just escaped the honor which is now and will be hereafter given to Virchow for a great pathological discovery," and Meigs himself said, "I have a just right to claim the merit of being the first writer to call the attention of the medical profession to these sudden concretions of those concresible elements of the blood in the heart and great vessels." It may be said he did not follow his discovery into detail as regards secondary deposits of emboli, nor did he assert such a claim.

As professor of obstetrics at