Page:American Medical Biographies - Kelly, Burrage.djvu/901

NAME PANCOAST 879 PANCOAST his last illness and only about a year before his death he wrote what he considered his best poetic effort, "Ned Braddock." Dr. Palmer died at Baltimore, from pneu- monia, in his eighty-first year, on February 26, 1906. He married Miss Henrietta Lee, also an authoress, of Baltimore, in 1855, who sur- vived him with one son. Eugene F. Cordell. Sketches and portrait of Dr. Palmer appeared in the "Baltimore Sun" of February 27, 1906; in "Old Maryland," vol. ii, No. 3, March, 1906, and in "The Hospital Bulletin" of the University of Maryland, vol. ii. No. 1, same date. Pancoasl, Joseph (1805-1882) Joseph Pancoast, son of John and Anne Abbott Pancoast, was born in Burlington, New Jersey, on the twenty-third of November, 1805, the descendant of an Englishman who came to this country with William Penn. Joseph graduated at the medical department of the University of Pennsylvania in 1828, and began to practise in Philadelphia, making surgery his specialty ; in 1831 beginning to teach classes in practical anatomy and surgery. He was appointed physician to the Philadelphia Hospital (Blockley) and head physician to the children's hospital connected with it. In 1838 he was elected professor of surgery in the Jefferson Medical College, and in 1847, pro- fessor of anatomy in the same institution. He held the latter chair until 1874, when he re- signed and was succeeded by his son, William H. Pancoast (q. v.). In addition, he was one of the surgeons of the Pennsylvania Hospital from March 27, 1854, until February 29, 1864. Many operations new to surgery were devised by him. Among them was one for soft and mixed cataracts. In this, a very fine needle, turned near the point into a sort of a hook, is passed through the front part of the vitreous humor, between the margin of the dilated iris and the lens, without touching the ciliary body. The advantage of this needle is that the soft part of the lens can be deeply cut and the hardened nucleus withdrawn, by a sort of hori- zontal displacement, along the line of entrance of the needle, the piece being left in the outer border of the vitreous humor. In 1841 lie devised the plow and groove or plastic suture, in which four raw surfaces, the beveled edges of the flaps, and the margins of the groove cut by the side of the nose to receive the naps come together. He used this suture in all his rhinoplastic operations, and union al- most invariably followed. He likewise devised an operation for empyema, by raising a semi- circular flap of the integuments over the ribs, and puncturing the pleura near the base of the flap; putting a short catheter down to the inner end of the puncture, secured with a strong string, and forming thus a fistulous opening, to which the movable flap served as a valve when the catheter was removed. He demonstrated that often bad cases of strabis- mus are due to the fact that the oblique muscle is girdled by rigid connective tissue, and that the tendons must be drawn out with a hook and cut. For the occlusion of the nasal duct, in ordinary cases of epiphora, he introduced, by a puncture of the lacrymal sac, a hollow ivory tube from which the earthy matter had been removed and left it to slowly dissolve. He several times restored a voice that was unintelligible by cutting the posterior muscles of the velum palati and loosening any attach- ment it may have made to the pharynx. He performed four times with success a lumbar operation for large abscesses, lying in the con- nective tissues between the colon and the cecum and the front of the quadratus lum- borum muscle. He originated an abdominal tourniquet, first used in 1860, which, by com- pressing the lower end of the aorta and by shutting off the arterial blood from the lower limbs, prevented death by loss of blood in amputations at the hip-joint, or even high up on the thigh. In 1862, before the class of the -Pennsylvania Hospital, Dr. Pancoast per- formed for the first time his cure for certain cases of tic douloureux, dividing the trunks of the fifth pair of nerves as they come out of their foramina, at the base of the skull. In January, 1868, he performed for the first time an operation, original with him, for the relief of exstrophy of the bladder, by turning down cutaneous flaps from the abdomen and groin over the hollow raw surface of the open bladder. Dr. Pancoast was a voluminous contributor to the American Journal of the Medical Sci- ences, the American Intelligencer, and the Medical Examiner; and the author of patho- logical and surgical monographs; essays and introductory lectures to his class, one of these being "Professional Glimpses Abroad" (1856). He edited "Manec on the Great Sympathetic Nerve," and on the "Cerebro-spinal System in Man," and "Quain's Anatomical Plates;" and published an annotated translation from the Latin of Lobstein's "Treatise on the Structure, Functions and Diseases of the Human Sym- pathetic Nerve" (1831); "Treatise on Opera- tive Surgery" (1844, third edition, 1852), his chief work; and a revised edition of Dr. Caspar Wistar's "System of Anatomy for the L^se of Students" (1844). He was a member