Page:American Medical Biographies - Kelly, Burrage.djvu/882

NAME O'CONNELL 860 O'DWYER O'Connell, Joseph John (1866-1916) Joseph John O'Connell, alienist and hygien- ist, was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1866. Dr. O'Connell's special work was in neurology and psychiatry and he did notable work in sanitation. He graduated at the Long Island College Hospital in 1887. For several years he was sanitary inspector of the Contagious Disease Bureau of the Brooklyn Board of Health; he was lecturer on hygiene in the New York University, lecturer on public health in the Long Island College Hospital and ex- officio a member of the New York City Board of Health. He was health officer of the port of New York, and brought about important changes in the quarantine service, one of which was the construction of the Quarantine Patho- logical and Bacteriological Laboratory; he worked out the scheme of cleansing the per- son and clothing of typhus patients to prevent spreading the disease. He was examiner in lunacy for New York City and alienist of Kings County Hospital; he was visiting physician to St. Mary's Hos- pital and the Hospital for Mental and Nervous Diseases, and surgeon to St. Mary's Female Hospital. Dr. O'Connell wrote : "The Possibility of Choleraic Infection of the Waters of New York Bay ;" "The World War and Maritime Commerce." He died at his home in the Quarantine Station, Staten Island, January 1, 1916, of myocarditis. Jour. Amer. Med. Assoc, 1916, vol. Ixvi, 133. O'Dwyer, Joseph (1841-1898) Joseph O'Dwyer. the inventor of intubation, was born in Cleveland, Ohio, October 12, 1841, and shortly after, his parents moving to Can- ada, he was brought up and educated not far from London, Ontario, beginning medical studies under a Dr. Anderson and coming up to New York to attend lectures at the New York College of Physicians and Surgeons. Graduating there in 1866 and shortly after ob- taining by competitive examinations the post of resident physician at the City Hospital of New York, on Blackvvells Island he did good service, twice contracting cholera, when that disease was rife. His next post was ex- aminer of patients for the City Board; in partnership with Dr. Warren Schoonover, he settled in New York and in 1872 was appointed to the place where he did his life work, at the Foundling Hospital. In 1891 St. John's College conferred on him an LL. D. In the year 1872 a bad epidemic of diphtheria was in the hospital and forty or fifty per cent. of the children were, in those ante-serum days, doomed, doctors and nurses being helpless to check the disease or to alleviate the horrors of asphyxiation. O'Dwyer, ingenious, reflective, a lover of children, began to ponder the situation. He often saw the inefficacy of tracheotomy intro- duced by Trousseau in Paris, and began to de- vise some method of providing a channel for the passage of air through the larynx, and at first devised a small bivalve speculum, which accomplished a little but not much ; the small patient, however, breathed with comparative ease for sixteen hours before death. An im- proved tube brought recovery in the second case and O'Dwyer's twelve years of labor and thought were rewarded. But the tubes were full of faults and O'Dwyer continued to work until he had perfected the instrument. The first mention of the "tube" occurs in a recorded history of the "dead-book" of the Foundling Hospital, April 25, 1884. His orig- inality has been doubted, yet although there were many others on the same path he was the one to reduce the idea of intubation to practical utility. There was some opposition too in the Foundling Hospital, as he seemed to be adding to the torture of the children by experimentation, and some of the special- ists in children's diseases had given the new method a trial and failed. A thorough dis- cussion of the method was held at a meeting of the -Academy of Medicine of New York, and it was a source of bitterest disappointment to O'Dwyer that many authorities on chil- dren's diseases agreed that his invention was of small service. Little by little, however, the advantages were seen and also in stenotic dis- tases of the larynx. It was characteristic of the real philanthropist to find O'Dwyer turn- ing with equal eagerness to study and to use anti-toxin as soon as it was introduced, con- tinuing its use when others were almost dis- couraged by the difficulty of determining a dose and the complications which followed Dr. Northrup. speaking of O'Dwyer, said, "In the maternity service he was the expert obstetrician ; in intubation an inventor and teacher, in general medical service the constant consulting mind whose opinion in times of clinical difficulties and troubles everyone sought." For nearly ten years after his wife's death he continued a large practice though never quite the same man again. He worried about his patients and was a poor sleeper. He was of a rather melancholy disposition and loved sad songs and stories. In December, 1897, he