Page:American Medical Biographies - Kelly, Burrage.djvu/940

PITCHER of consumption among the aborigines, and in his article on "Indian Therapeutics," printed in the fourth volume of Schoolcraft's history of the "Conditions and Prospects of the Indian Tribes." In 1835 he was president of the Army Medical Board.

In 1836 Dr. Pitcher resigned his commission and settled in Detroit. From 1837 to 1852 he was regent of the University and probably planned most details respecting the medical department. With the appointment of the medical faculty he was made emeritus professor. He was mayor of Detroit in 1840–41–43. Long dissatisfied with the educational facilities of the frontier town, he made an exhaustive study of its schools and laid the results before the Common Council and persuaded it to join him in asking the Legislature to enact a law authorizing the establishment of free public schools in Detroit; the petition was granted. He was city physician, 1847; county physician, 1845; and during Buchanan's administration, surgeon of the Marine Hospital in Detroit. He was elected president of the American Medical Association at its meeting in Detroit, 1856, and was editor of the Peninsular Medical Journal, 1855–56–58. He was president of the Old Territorial Medical Society during fourteen years; president of the Michigan State Medical Society, 1855–56; a founder of the Sydenham Society; a founder of the Detroit Medical Society, 1852–58.

Zina Pitcher was versed in the habits of beasts and birds; his contributions to Indian materia medica were classic. His perception of scientific facts was unusually quick and his memory tenacious. In driving through the country he at once detected an unfamiliar plant or animal, secured a specimen and determined its place. While in Texas he collected many fossils and forwarded them to the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences. Studies of these and allied collections were the basis of (q. v.) work entitled "Cretaceous System of the United States." One of the specimens is known as "Gryphœa Pitcheri." In "Gray and Torrey's Flora of the United States" several new species are named after Dr. Pitcher in acknowledgment of his service to botany. He was a frequent contributor to medical literature, treating a wide variety of subjects. His home was at the service of the sick; he was known to have taken a stranger suffering from smallpox into his home, and to both nurse and doctor him to recovery. Moreover, to him the Bible was a guide, a counsellor and inspiration.

In 1824 Zina Pitcher married Ann Sheldon, of Kalamazoo, Michigan, and had a son (Nathaniel) and daughter (Rose), the mother dying in 1864. In 1867 he married Emily Backus, granddaughter of Col. Nathaniel Rochester, of Virginia, the founder of Rochester, New York, and on the death of DeWitt Clinton, acting governor of New York.

Dr. Pitcher died April 5, 1872, from unoperated stone in the bladder.



Plant, William Tomlinson (1836–1898)

William	Tomlinson Plant, a medico-legal expert, was born at Marcellus, New York, July 27, 1836, of English ancestry, taking his medical degree at the University of Michigan, at Ann Arbor, in 1860.

At first he settled at Ithaca, New York, later, however, he removed to Susquehanna, Pennsylvania, and, in 1861, joined the United States Navy, holding the positions of assistant and past-assistant surgeon. Resigning in 1865, he settled in Syracuse.

In 1866 he married Frances C. Walrath, of Chittenango, New York.

For some years he was professor of clinical medicine and medical	 jurisprudence in the medical department of the Syracuse University and wrote repeatedly on medico-legal topics, some of his work possessing enduring value. He was the author of a "Succinct History of Medicine of the Last Century."



Pollak, Simon (18161814 [sic]–1903)

Simon Pollak was born near Prague, Bohemia, April 14, 1816April 14 or 16, 1814 [sic], and received his M. D. there in 1835, and certificates for surgery and obstetrics in Vienna, 1836. Arriving in New York in 1838, he spent a short time in New Orleans and in other southern towns, and in March, 1845, settled in St. Louis, Missouri, where he was one of the founders of the Missouri Institute for the Blind in 1850. In 1859 he went to Europe and spent almost two years in study in Paris, Vienna, Berlin, and London, returning to St. Louis in 1861. On account of the Civil War he removed to New