Page:American Medical Biographies - Kelly, Burrage.djvu/934

PHYSICK medicine which he occupied until 1871, when he retired from active college work and became professor emeritus. Afterwards, he collected for the college a museum of pathological anatomy with money furnished him by his friend, Hon. E. M. Stoughton, and 1851 and 1852 saw him traveling in Europe. The honorary A. M. was conferred on him by the University of Vermont in 1835 and that of LL. D. by the same institution in 1857.

During the Civil War he was a member of the State Board of Examining Surgeons and in this position earned a high reputation for strict and impartial judgment. In the fall of 1861 he was given active duty on the staff of the commander of the Vermont Brigade, serving during the spring and summer of 1862 in the Peninsula. On account of impaired health, he returned to Vermont and was put in charge of the Military Hospital and Camp at Brattleboro. This camp attained a wide reputation for the percentage of recoveries which took place there and the credit for this was chiefly due to Dr. Phelps. During the closing months of the war, he was transferred to a Kentucky hospital from which he returned to his home and practice at Windsor.

Dr. Phelps was one of the founders of the Connecticut Valley Medical Society and also its president. He was also a member of the Vermont State Medical Society. To both of these organizations he presented valuable papers. He was a genuine, sincere man, who hated hypocrisy and quackery of any form.

He married, in 1821, Phoebe Foxcroft Lynn, of Boston, and had one daughter. Phelps died November 26, 1880.



Physick, Philip Syng (1768–1837)

Philip Syng Physick, "Father of American Surgery," was born in Philadelphia, July 7, 1768, of Edmund and Abigail Syng Physick, daughter of a silversmith. His father was receiver-general of the Province of Pennsylvania and after the Revolution agent for the Penn estates. He intended his son to be a physician and made him one in spite of the lad's expressed objection to studying medicine. From the Friends' School, kept by Robert Proud, the local historian, he went to Pennsylvania University and graduated A. B. in 1785, studying afterwards with (q. v). He was, to quote Gross, "a faithful, scrupulous toiling soul, something of a prig and not popular with his mates but readily devouring any mental pabulum offered him, notably when, advised to read Cullen's first lines on the 'Practice of Physic' he learnt by heart all the dreary stuff." His father was determined to give the son every opportunity of learning his profession, so sent him in 1789 to London, where he was fortunate enough to live with John Hunter and to gain his esteem for his skilful dissections, and his influence to obtain the post of house-surgeon to St. George's Hospital, where he stayed a year. On leaving he was made a member of the Royal College of Surgeons.

Five testimonials as to "medical qualifications and correct deportment" were given young Physick when he left St. Georges, and Hunter offered him a partnership. Why he refused the honor of this collaboration and the opportunity of working with Astley Cooper, Abernethy, and Home, Physick, reticent always, does not state. He went instead to Edinburgh and took his M. D. there when twenty-four, in 1792.

Everything seemed to point to rapid success when the young doctor, fresh from John Hunter and Edinburgh and armed with good recommendations, landed again in Philadelphia in 1792, but perhaps for want of "push" he was some three years with scarcely any practice. A terrible epidemic of yellow fever, however, broke out in 1793, and volunteering help, he was elected physician to the fever hospital at Bush Hill, a work which would have brought him more in contact with those who could be useful to him, only he resigned the next day owing, so it is said, to his objection to serve with one Devèze, a Frenchman. But he did faithful work among the yellow-fever patients, always following his master, making careful notes and frequent autopsies and making a living by taking care of several families for a small annual sum, and in 1794, Devèze being no longer at Bush Hill, he took service there; this, with his surgeoncy at the Pennsylvania Hospital, brought him into prominence. The year 1800 saw him lecturing on surgery in the University School to certain students, lectures which Rush himself attended and applauded. During thirteen years he was professor of surgery and during that period made his great reputation. "For the first time here students heard something more than theory and a mere setting forth of operations and technic; they were taken to the root of things and made to observe, deduce and record."

In the operating-room his deftness and precision were remarkable and as a lithotomist