Page:American Medical Biographies - Kelly, Burrage.djvu/890

NAME OTIS 868 OTIS physician who practised at Scituate, Massa- chusetts. The father of Otis, also George Alexander Otis, married Maria Hickman, and George Alexander was born in Boston, Massa- chusetts, November 12, 1830. In 1846 he en- tered Princeton College and graduated, with the degree of A. B., in 1849, and the college conferred upon him the degree of A. M. in 1852. In the fall of 1849 he went to Phila- delphia, and matriculated in the medical depart- ment of the University of Pennsylvania. That institution conferred upon him the degree of M. D. in April, 1851. During a stay in Paris Otis made diligent use of the opportunities afforded for professional improvement. More- over, he took a deep interest in the stirring panorama of French politics, as shown by a series of letters he took time to write to the Boston Evening Transcript. In the spring of 1852 Otis returned to the United States. Immediately after his return he established himself at Richmond, Virginia, where he opened an office for general medical and surgical practice, and where his tastes and ambition soon led him to embark in his earliest enterprise in the domain of medical literature. In April, 1853, he issued the first number of The Virginia Medical and Surgical Journal. Dr. Howell L. Thomas, of Richmond, was associated with him as co-editor, but the finan- cial risk was assumed entirely by Otis. Its most striking characteristic was the number of translations and abstracts from current French medical Hterature which appeared in its pages. Otis had, by this time, become dis- satisfied with his prospects of professional success in Richmond, and circumstances led him to select Springfield, Massachusetts, as his place of residence. Another journal. The Stethoscope, was united with The Virginia Medical and Surgical Journal, with McCaw as editor, and Otis as corresponding editor, until 1859. The War of the Rebellion changed the whole tenor of his life. During almost the whole time Surgeon Otis accompanied his regiment — the 27th Massachusetts Volunteers — and shared its fortunes. January 22, 1864, he was detached and ordered to Yorktown, Virginia, to assume the duties of surgeon- in-chief of Gen. Wistar's command. June 26, 1864, he tendered his resignation and re- ceived an appointment as assistant surgeon of United States Volunteers, to date from June 30, 1864. At this time he renewed his acquaintance with Surgeon Crane, then on duty in the sur- geon-general's office, and in 1864 Otis was as- signed as assistant to Surgeon John H. Brinton (q. v.), curator of the Army Medical Museum, and engaged in the duty of collecting materials for the "Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion." The first half of the volume was occupied by the "Surgical Report" prepared by Otis. It was a thoughtfully prepared docu- ment, which excited the universal admiration of military surgeons in Europe as well as in America. The first was "A Report on Ampu- tations at the Hip-joint in Military Surgery," published as "Circular No. 7." Surgeon-Gen- eral's office, July 1, 1867. An examination of this monograph shows that he had already pretty well begun to emancipate himself from the leading strings of the French school, and had fully acquired the desire, so manifest in his subsequent work, to compare and weigh all accessible human knowledge on each branch of his subject before arriving at his own conclu- sions. The second of the studies was : "A Report on Excisions of the Head of the Femur for Gunshot Injury," published as "Circular No. 2," Surgeon-General's Office, January 2, 1869. During the interval between the appear- ance of these two volumes, and subsequently, Otis found time to prepare and publish several valuable reports on subjects connected with military surgery, one of which was : "A Report of Surgical Cases Treated in the Army of the United States from 1865 to 1871," issued as "Circular No. 3," from the Surgeon-General's Office, August 17, 1871. He was engaged at the time of his death on the third surgical volume, which he left in an unfinished condi- tion ; a colossal fragment. In 1869 Dr. Otis, then curator of the Museum, arranged with Secretary Henry of the Smithsonian Institu- tion for the transfer to the museum of all human skeletal material, and by means of cir- culars and letters he so added to the anthro- pological collection of the Army Medical Museum, that in 1873 they included approxi- mately sixteen hundred crania of American aborigines and other races. Otis received the appointments of captain, major, and lieutenant-colonel by brevet, to date from September 29, 1866, "for faithful and meritorious services during the war." He was promoted to be surgeon in the army, with the rank of major, March 17, 1880. He was elected a foreign member of the Medical So- ciety of Norway, October 26, 1870; a foreign corresponding member of the Surgical Society of Paris, August 11, 1875, and an honorary life member of the Massachusetts Medical So- ciety in February, 1877. Until his last illness Otis retained much of the fondness for litera- ture which characterized him in early life. Hesitating, often embarrassed in his manner in ordinary conversation, especially with