Page:American Medical Biographies - Kelly, Burrage.djvu/925

NAME PEIRSON 903 PENNOCK leading members of his profession with whom he had many ties of friendship. He married his cousin, Harriet Lawrence, in 1819, and in 1832 went abroad and studied medicine in Paris and elsewhere, being among the first of the Americans to become ac- quainted with Laennec's method of exploring the chest for the physical signs of disease. With J. B. Flint, Elisha Bartlett and A. A. Gould he edited the Medical Magazine, Boston, an independent periodical that had an exist- ence from July, 1832, to July, 1835. In his practice he gave chief attention to surgery and acquired a high reputation. From a conversation he had with Dr. Charles T. Jackson (q. v.) in October, 1846, he learned of the properties of sulphuric ether. He was pres- ent at the Massachusetts General Hospital on the occasion of the first use of that anesthetic, October 16, having been a consulting surgeon to that hospital since 1839, and November 14, 1846, he made trial of etherization in the re- moval of a fatty tumor, with complete suc- cess. Again, on November 19, he did an amputation of the arm without the patient e.xperiencing pain, and in the next few days did an amputation of the leg and removed a large fatty tumor of the shoulder under ether anesthesia, the ether being administered in each case by a dentist named Fisk. These cases were sent to the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal for report. {Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, December 2, 1846, vol. XXV, p. 362.) This is the first published report of surgical operations performed with the aid of ether anesthesia — the "New Gas" — outside the Massachusetts General Hospital. He was an active fellow of the Massachu- setts Medical Society and was at one time president of Esse.x South District branch of the society; he was also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. While returning from a meeting of the American Medical Association he was killed in a railway wreck at Norwalk, Connecticut, May 6, 1853. His wife and five children sur- vived him, the oldest son, Edward Brooks, becoming a physician in Salem. Among his writings are to be mentioned : "Some Account of the Measles Epidemic in Salem in 1821"; "The Boylston Prize Essay on Chin-cough in 1824"; "Operation for Hare- Lip," 1836, and "A Dissertation on Fractures," 1840 ("Communications Massachusetts Medi- cal," vol. vi, p. 261). Walter L. Burr age. Letters of A. L. Peirson, loaned by his grandson. Dr. E. L. Peirson. Obit, by James Jackson, M. D., Comm., Mass. Med. Soc, vol. viii, 234. Pendleton, Lewis Warrington (1844-1898) Named after Commodore Warrington, of the navy, his father having been a secretary to that officer for some years, Lewis War- rington Pendleton was born in Camden, Maine, March 18, 1844. At the age of ten his parents moved to Gorham, Maine, in order that their children might have the benefit of instruction at the local academy. When he was seventeen, young Pendleton returned to Belfast and began to study with Dr. Nahum Parker Monroe (q. v.). When the war broke out, he became a hos- pital steward, and after his return, on account of poor health, renewed his medical studies and graduated at the Medical College of Albany, New York, in 1865. To that in- stitution he always had great allegiance, and ten years later delivered before its graduating class a remarkable oration on the "Loneliness of the Physician." He practised in Belfast for fourteen years very successfully and then moved to Port- land in 1880, where he at once obtained a fine clientage and much personal favor, so that upon his death he was greatly mourned. At the death of William Warren Greene (q.v.) he was elected a surgeon to the Maine General Hospital. In that position he did excellent and conscientious work until his resignation in 1895, owing to poor health. He was twice elected president of the Maine Medical Asso- ciation, and on each occasion delivered an excellent address. Besides the orations above mentioned, he read papers on "Nephrectomy" and on "Trans- mitted Tendencies," which were of great literary and medical value. The death of two lovely children in early married life had apparently been compensated for by the birth of a fine boy, but he also was suddenly taken away when ready for college. This was a double shock, and al- though the doctor attended to his practice in Portland, and even went to the South for vacations, it was plain to his friends that the end could not be very far away. For all that, the news of his death in Florida, January 13, 1898, from a hopeless disease with which he had been suffering for years, came with a sense of profound grief to his large body of friends. t a o James A. Spalding. Trans. Maine Med. Assoc. Pennock, Caspar Wistar (1799-1867) Caspar Wistar Pennock, son of George Pen- nock and Sarah Wistar, was born in Phila- delphia, Pennsylvania, July 2, 1799. He en-