Page:American Medical Biographies - Kelly, Burrage.djvu/874

NORCOM On account of ill health Dr. Noeggerath gave up practice in 1885 and a year later moved to Wiesbaden, Germany. There he brought out his magnum opus in 1892, a treatise on the structure and development of carcinoma, and died, of kidney disease, three years later, May 3, 1895.

He married Rolanda Noeggerath, of Brussels in 1874. Of the four children, one son, Jakob Emil, became a consulting electrical engineer. A younger son, Karl, was professor of pediatry in Freiburg, Germany.



Norcom, William Augustus Blount (1836–1881)

He was born in Edenton, North Carolina, May 24, 1836, the youngest son of Dr. James Norcom, a learned physician of that place. His early education was at home with his father, but he afterwards went to the Edenton Academy. He did not take a college course and graduated in medicine from the University of Pennsylvania in 1857, afterwards settling in his native town. When the Civil War broke out he was appointed assistant surgeon in the hospital at Petersburg, Virginia.

He was president of the Medical Society of North Carolina in 1874, and a member of the Board of Examiners from 1872 to 1878. His presidential address on "Malarial Hemorrhagic Fever" was a valuable contribution to the literature of that disease. Another of his comprehensive papers was "The Modern Treatment of Acute Internal Inflammation" (1868). Dr. Norcom was particularly noted for his scholarly attainments and wonderful powers of memory. Page after page of his favorite authors he could repeat by heart. He lived in an atmosphere of medical events and was said to be more enthusiastic about medicine than ardent in its practice. He died in St. Vincent's Hospital, Baltimore, February 28, 1881.



Norris, George Washington (1808–1875)

George Washington Norris, eminent surgeon in pre-antiseptic days, authority on fractures, author of surgical papers, and a local medical historian, was the sixth son of Joseph Parker Norris and Elizabeth Hill Fox and was born November 6, 1808, in Philadelphia, in the house known as the "Chestnut Street House," built by his grandfather, Charles Norris, on the site where the Custom House now stands. His ancestors were English. The earliest known, Thomas Norris, London merchant in 1650, joined the Quakers and was driven by persecutions to seek a home in the Island of Jamaica. Here he and his entire family except an absent son, Isaac, were killed in the earthquake of 1692. Isaac, changing his home to Philadelphia, entered mercantile life, took active interest in all that concerned the colony, and was an elder in the Society of Friends; he was judge of the Court of Common Pleas, was the friend of William Penn and married a daughter of Thomas Lloyd, first deputy governor of the Province. He died in 1735, and his son, Isaac, became speaker of the Colonial Assembly 1751–64.

George W. Norris, as he was known, had his early education with the author and distinguished teacher James Ross, then entered the Academic Department of the University of Pennsylvania, graduating A. B. in 1827, after which he studied medicine under (q. v.); he took his M. D. from the University in 1830, offering a thesis on "Varioloid and Vaccine Diseases." Immediately after he was made a resident physician in the Pennsylvania Hospital, remaining until 1833, when he went to Paris and attended lectures of Dupuytren, Velpeau, Roux and Magendie. He was elected a member of the Société Médicale d'Observation. In 1835 he returned to Philadelphia and practised.

He succeeded (q. v.) as one of the surgeons in the Pennsylvania Hospital in 1836, serving until 1863; he was professor of clinical surgery in the University of Pennsylvania 1848–1857 when he resigned, having been elected a trustee of the University in 1856; he was consulting surgeon to the Orthopedic Hospital and to the Children's Hospital, and president of the board of managers of the latter.

He was member of the Academy of Natural Sciences, of the American Philosophical Society, and for many years a director of the Philadelphia Library. His tastes led him to historical research and, interested in the early history of Philadelphia, he gathered material for a book to be called "Medicine and the Early Medical Men of Philadelphia," and printed fifty pages on a hand press. These historical data were found among his effects and published by his son, (q. v.) in 1886 with the title "The Early History of Medicine in Philadelphia." "It is certainly the most interesting and valuable record of medical annals that has ever appeared in