Page:American Medical Biographies - Kelly, Burrage.djvu/899

NAME PALMER 877 PALMER hard hours of dire travail, remember that your patience and gentleness to her must be as boundless as the sea. Your attention should be infallible, study and adapt yourselves to her whims of exceeding great agony, give, yes, keep giving her hope and bless her with your strength. Let your untiring attention to babe and mother be so that a clean conscience can make you undreading face your God. Each pang of pain that she is denied betters the growing soul of progeny." Moses Fallen's work bore fruit for fifty- eight years, truly a rare cycle of virtued bene- fit. Every detail of the lying-in period was placed before the student in its most effective light. "Gentlemen," he would say, "as the head presses down upon the pudenda, take large flannel cloths, well boiled, and when still gen- erous with their heat keep them to the pudenda. This gracious warmth gives unimagined com- fort and relaxes the assailed muscles, thus making an easier passage-way for the head." He could say "pudenda" with such volume and import as to make it sound almost like the boom of an explosion. His direction for the fixing of the navel cord and the belly band upon the child was given with all the grave profundity and seriousness as though it was earth's most important affair of state. His direction for the application of a diaper upon the child was inexpressibly scientifically comical. His worth requires no interpreter and duty to him was as the voice of God. He was like necessity, he did everything well, never wild in his assertions, he always acted as he believed — that nothing is impossible to well directed labor. He held the chair of obstetrics in the St. Louis Medical College over twenty years and was also a founder and one time president of the St. Louis Academy of Science. This latter office he also filled with the St. Louis Medical Society. During the Mexican War he held a contract surgeonship in St. Louis for the United States Army. He died in St. Louis on September 25, 1876. His wife was Janet Cochran, daughter of William Wallace Cochran, of Baltimore. Warren B. Outten. St. Louis Med. Courier, 1904. vol. xxx. Portrait. Trans. Am. Med. Assoc, Phila., 1877, vol. xxviii. Palmer, Alonzo Benjamin (1815-1887) Alonzo Palmer was born October 6, 1815, in Richfield, New York, of Puritan parents; his father, a native of Connecticut, died when he was nine years old. His early education was at the schools and academies of Oswego, Otsego and Herkimer. In 1839 he took his M. D. from Fairfield Medical College, Fair- field, New York. After practising twelve years at Tecumseh, Michigan, he removed to Chicago, where for two years he was associated with Dr. N. S. Davis (q.v.). Meantime he spent two winters in New York and Philadelphia studying in hospitals and clinics. During the cholera epidemic of 1852 he was city physician in Chicago and had charge of the cholera hos- pital, caring for about fifteen hundred patients yearly. In 1852 he was appointed professor of anatomy, medical department, Michigan University, but from lack of funds never oc- cupied the chair. In 1854 he was given the chair of materia inedica and therapeutics and diseases of women and children, and in 1869 was transferred to the chair of pathology and theory and practice of medicine, which he oc- cupied till death. In May, 1861, he vas ap- pointed surgeon of the Second Michigan In- fantry and surgeon in Gen. Richardson's Brigade, at the first battle of Bull Run, and other operations of his regiment until he re- signed in September. In 1864 he was pro- fessor of pathology and practice of medicine in Berkshire Medical Institution at Pittsfield, Massachusetts. In 1869 he was called to a similar position at the medical department, Bowdoin College, Maine, doing the work in the vacations at the other institutions. From 1854- 60 he was an editor of the Pcninsidar Medical Journal, and the consolidated Peninsular and Independent 'Medical Journal, Detroit, and president, in 1872, of the Michigan State Med- ical Society. In 1875 he succeeded Dr. Abram Sager as dean of the medical department, Michigan LIniversity, and except for one year held the office till his death. In 1855 the Uni- versity of Nashville, Tennessee, gave him the honorary A. M., and he had the LL. D., Uni- versity of Michigan, in 1881. Above every- thing else he loved to lecture; one year to the same class he delivered one hundred and ninety-six lectures, half of them new. At any moment he was ready to fill a vacant hour in any course in the department, never regarding it a hardship. In 1867 he married Love M. Root, of Pitts- field, Massachusetts, who survived him and perpetuated his memory by endowing the Palmer Ward at the University Hospital, also by erecting a tower on St. Andrew's Episcopal Church, of which he was a member. They had no children. Dr. Palmer died at his home in Ann Arbor, December 23, 1887, from septicemia. Alonzo B. Palmer's most ambitious publica- tion and towards which all other writings