Page:American Medical Biographies - Kelly, Burrage.djvu/913

NAME PARSONS 891 PARSONS Joseph Parsons, who came from England and was living in Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1646. His mother was a daughter of the Rev. John Blunt, of New Castle, New Hampshire, and was connected with the celebrated Sir William Pepperell, who captured Louisburg in 1745. Young Usher was named for a relative, the Hon. John Usher, once lieutenant-governor of the province of New Hampshire. He had an ordinary country school education, and was clerk for a while in shops in Portland and Kennebunk, Maine. It was at the latter place, when about twenty years of age, that he printed his first literary effort, in the shape of some verses entitled "A Pettifogger's Sohl- oquy." Having accumulated a little money he began to study medicine with Dr. Abiel Hall, of Alfred, and attended a course of lec- tures at Fryeburg under the direction of that eccentric yet talented anatomist, Alexander Ramsay (q.v.). After a few months his funds were so depleted that he was compelled to return home, to discover one night when tramping on the highway that he was an ig- noramus and that without general knowledge he could not proceed in the study of medicine. He therefore devoted the next two years to Greek and Latin with the Rev. Moses Sweat, of Sanford, and then graduated at Berwick Academy. Having now obtained a better understanding of the classics, he re- sumed medicine with Dr. Hall, continued with Dr. Joseph Kittredge, of Andover, Massachu- setts, and finished his medical apprenticeship with Dr. John Warren (q.v.), of Boston. The catalogue of the Massachusetts Medical So- ciety dates Dr. Usher Parsons as a fellow in 1818, but a license for him to practise medicine and surgery issued by this society, February 7, 1812, is still extant. Leaving Boston, he tried for an opening at Exeter, and Dover, New Hampshire. Then he applied for service in the navy, for the War of 1812, declared on the eighteenth of June, and received notice that if he hastened back to Boston he could have the berth of surgeon's-mate on the United States Ship John Adams. Although arriving post haste, he was mortified to find that the ship had sailed without him. He then walked to Salem, hoping for a similar appointment on a pri- vateer then fitting out, but some one else had just forestalled him. He set off on foot for Dover, and soon received an appointment as surgeon's-mate in the navy. Curiously enough he was ordered to the Adams, but knowing that she had sailed, he volunteered for a secret expedition to the Great Lakes, presumably to be under the command of Commodore Chaun- cey. Arriving in Buffalo in October, 1812, he found many people suffering from an epi- demic of pleuro-pneumonia, and as a sort of graduating thesis, wrote for a local paper suggestions regarding its cause, treatment, and cure. The winter and spring of 1812-13 were passed in taking care of the sick and wound- ed in the neighborhood of Buffalo, and when Commodore Perry arrived in June, 1813, Usher Parsons was at once brought into great and unusual intimacy with him, owing to the fact that the other surgeons of superior rank were all on the sick list. His health was miserable on the tenth of September when the battle of Lake Erie was fought, but as his good fortune would have it he was the only surgeon on the Lazi'- rencc, against which the enemy concentrated its entire fire with the strategic view that if the commodore's flagship were ruined the en- tire fleet would be obliged to surrender. Ow- ing to the enormous damage to the Laurence, Perry, as is well known, was compelled to transfer his flag to the Niagara. Nearly every one on the Lawrence was wounded, the ship seemed ready to sink, she actually surrendered. But when after another hour or two Commodore Perry returned victorious and once more hauled aloft his pennant, he was supported on that hloody deck by Dr. Usher Parsons, who had done phenomenal surgery during the famous fight. The Lawrence being shallow built, the wounded were received in the ward room on the level with the water, with the result that the enemy's fire went straight through that improvised operating room measuring about twelve by eighteen feet. A midshipman with a tourniquet applied to his arm was moving away from Dr. Parsons when a cannon ball hit him in the breast and killed him. As Dr. Parsons was dressing a fractured arm another cannon ball injured both of the patient's legs. Almost all that he could do on that day with so many wounded was to give sedatives, check hemorrhage and apply the necessary dress- ings, but amidst that awful cannonading he performed six amputations of the thigh. On the next morning the wounded from the entire fleet, including those remaining over on the Lawrence from the day before, ninety-six in all, were brought to Dr. Parsons, and before nightfall everything necessary for their recovery was completed, the enemy's surgeons most humanely assisting.