Page:American Medical Biographies - Kelly, Burrage.djvu/947

PORTER 1777. In that year he also served in the repulse of the British after their Danbury raid. Resigning his commission in 1780, he served under a commission from state authorities as the manager of the iron works in Salisbury and thus superintended the manufacture of the first home-made cannon balls that were used during the war. In 1778 he was appointed a member of the Council of Safety.

Retaining full possession of his faculties, he died in Salisbury on April 2, 1825, aged 94 years and three-quarters.

He was three times married, his first wife being Abigail, daughter of his former guardian, Deacon Peter Buell and Martha Huntington Grant Buell. She died on October 7, 1797, leaving three sons and three daughters, all of whom lived to maturity. He next married on December 31, 1799, Jerusha, youngest daughter of Col. Andrew and Sarah Sturges Burr, and widow of Hezekiah Fitch of Salisbury. She died in February, 1808, and in the following August he married Jane, daughter of Col. John Ashley of Sheffield, Massachusetts. She had been previously twice married.



Porter, Robert Robinson (1811–1876)

Robert R. Porter entered the University of Pennsylvania, graduating in 1833, and soon after was appointed resident physician of Frankford Insane Hospital (1835). He was a member of the Delaware State Medical Society, its president in 1858. His practice was confined exclusively to Wilmington, Delaware, with the exception of one year's residence at the Frankford Insane Hospital.

Dr. Porter was a physician of ability and of high professional honor; in addition, a man of enterprise and of public spirit and took a leading position in every movement for public good.

He married, in 1841, Lucinda, only daughter of Judge Millard Hall, and had five daughters and one son. Dr. Porter died suddenly of apoplexy, April 14, 1876.

He published in the American Medical Journal his "Observations on the Condition and Treatment of the Insane," and also assisted (q. v.) in the preparation of his work on "Phthisis Pulmonalis."



Post, Alfred Charles (1806–1886)

This clever nephew of a clever uncle— (q. v.)—began his classical education in Columbia College when only fourteen. He was born in New York City, January 13, 1806, of Joel H. and Elizabeth Browne Post; his father was a successful merchant. The boy held his A. B. from Columbia 1822 and worked under his uncle in 1823, but he took at the same time courses of lectures at the College of Physicians and Surgeons. He had smallpox which laid him up for some time when he was able to set to work with new vigor and get his M. D. in 1827. Like most young men of the time, he went to Europe, flitting about from England to Paris and Berlin and Italy. In 1829 he returned to New York and became house surgeon to the New York Hospital and in 1836 visiting surgeon, a position held until 1853. When in 1851 he became professor of surgery in the University of the City of New York, his lectures were very popular, particularly those on ophthalmic, aural, orthopedic and plastic surgery. In 1840 he published a small treatise on "Strabismus," having operated for this affection at an earlier period than any other American surgeon. That same year he devised a new method for doing bilateral lithotomy, employing, to divide the prostate, a canula sliding over a rod and armed with two knives one of which projected on each side. No operation was for him too great or too small; he did extirpation of the thyroid, parotid and cervical glands, made an artificalartificial [sic] anus, and performed tracheotomy. As an aside from his surgical duties he was keen on missionary work and said, not irreverently, that the two things he most enjoyed were a good operation and a good prayer meeting.

His colleagues say he could not be said to have passed middle life until he was eighty. During the last ten years of his life he performed some of his most delicate operations in plastic surgery and four months before his death did a difficult ovariotomy in forty-five minutes.

In 1831 he married Harriet, daughter of Cyrenius Beers, of New York, and had eleven children, one of whom was Dr. George Edward Post (1838–1909), a medical missionary, scientist and author, who graduated in medicine at the University of the City of New York in 1860 and spent his life at Beirut, Syria.

He held among other appointments the professorship of surgery in the medical department of the University of the City of New York; president of the medical faculty there;