Page:American Medical Biographies - Kelly, Burrage.djvu/941

POLK York and aided in the founding of the United States Sanitary Commission. On behalf of this society he returned to St. Louis, where he joined the Western Sanitary Commission. About this time he organized the first eye and ear clinic west of the Mississippi, in St. Louis. He invented a scleral puncture in painful glaucomatous eyes that, being properly performed, saved many a disfiguring enucleation. In 1863 he was appointed general hospital inspector United States Sanitary Commission at a salary of two hundred and fifty dollars a month, a position he accepted, but declined the salary.

He married in 1863 a daughter of Samuel Perry, of Cincinnati, and had two sons.

One of the early members of the American Ophthalmological Society, he was known as a prominent oculist and teacher, active and very popular throughout his unusually long life. At his last birthday his friends and colleagues tendered him a great ovation at a dinner.

He died October 31, 1903.



Polk, William Mecklenburg (1844–1918)

William Mecklenburg Polk, gynecologist of New York, son of Leonidas and Frances Devereux Polk, was born in Ashwood, Maury County, Tennessee, August 15, 1844. His early education was obtained in Marion, Alabama, and at St. James College, Maryland, where he prepared for admission to the Military Institute of Lexington, Virginia, then conducted under the personal direction of General Stonewall Jackson. There he pursued the mathematic and scientific course of study preparatory to entering West Point Military Academy. When the war between the states began, he was in his seventeenth year, but physically well equipped and with a knowledge of military tactics that enabled him at once to be of assistance to the Confederacy. He began service in 1861 under General Jack-son in Richmond, as drill master of Virginia state troops, and later, while attached to the staff of General Zollikoffer, served as drill master of Tennessee state troops. From April, 1861, to May, 1865, Polk was continually in active service and it is doubtful if any soldier under either flag took part in more battles and skirmishes. In May, 1863, he was appointed assistant chief of artillery in Polk's Corps, and subsequently captain in the adjutant general's department, Army of the Tennessee, on the staff of General Joseph E. Johnston.

At the close of the war Dr. Polk accepted a position as superintendent of the outdoor department of the Brierfield (Alabama) Iron Works, and while thus employed became interested in medicine, beginning its study at that time under the direction of Dr. E. W. C. Bailey. He then attended the medical department of the University of Louisiana (now Tulane University). In 1868 he came to New York, where he continued his studies in the College of Physicians and Surgeons, from which he was graduated in 1869. Immediately thereafter he entered Bellevue Hospital as interne on the medical side and served the required eighteen months, during which time he was brought into close relations with Drs. John S. Metcalfe,, , and  (q. v. to Clark, Flint, Wood and Loomis). At the close of his service he received an appointment as one of the curators to the pathological department of the hospital, in which capacity he served for one and one-half years. Later he received an appointment as assistant demonstrator of anatomy in Bellevue Hospital Medical College and was then advanced to the position of professor of materia medica, therapeutics and clinical medicine in the same institution. After filling this position for four years, in 1879 he accepted the appointment to the professorship of obstetrics and diseases of women in the medical department of the University of the City of New York. Meanwhile, in 1874, he had been appointed visiting physician to Bellevue Hospital, and in 1878 visiting physician to St. Luke's Hospital.

After accepting the position of professor of obstetrics and diseases of women in the University, Dr. Polk resigned from the staff of St. Luke's Hospital in order to concentrate his attention upon gynecological work in Bellevue, where in conjunction with Dr. W. Gill Wylie and (q. v.), he devoted himself to the creation of the large gynecological service which sprang up in that institution under the combined efforts of these three men. Dr. Polk continued to devote himself mainly to surgical gynecology and gradually withdrew from the teaching of obstetrics, being succeeded in that department by Dr. J. Clifton Edgar, Dr. Polk having the title of professor of diseases of women.

In 1898, when, through the interest of Colonel Oliver H. Payne in higher medical education, the medical department of Cornell University was inaugurated, Dr. Polk was honored by the appointment as dean of the faculty and also filled the chair of diseases of women in the same institution. Upon him, together with (q. v.), devolved the arduous labor of successfully