Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/918

836 that he had reason to expect—he left Edinburgh and took his degree at Göttingen, returning to America toward the close of the year 1789. He began to practice his profession in Philadelphia, where his knowledge of science soon caused him to be looked upon as one of the rising young men of the day.

The trustees of the College of Philadelphia having instituted a professorship of Natural History and Botany, appointed Dr. Barton, then only twenty-four years of age, to the chair. This appointment was confirmed in the following year, when the college united with the University of Pennsylvania, and was held by him for the rest of his life. Dr. Barton thus became the first instructor in natural history in Philadelphia, and probably was the first in any American college. Five years later the professorship of Materia Medica in the university became vacant, and this chair also was assigned to Dr. Barton and was held by him until he succeeded to that of Dr. Rush. On January 28, 1798, he received an appointment as one of the physicians of the Pennsylvania Hospital, which position he held for the rest of his life. Dr. Barton was a man of high ambition, and being deeply impressed by the well-deserved fame of Prof. Rush, spared no exertions to equal it. When the latter died, he very naturally desired to obtain his professorship, and his application was followed in a few months by his appointment.

Dr. Barton had been from early life subject to hæmorrhages and to attacks of gout—his period of illness while a student at Edinburgh was due to these causes—and he had further weakened his health by too great application to his scientific and professional labors. He had sustained a severe hæmorrhage just before undertaking the labor of preparing for his new position. He had delivered but two courses of lectures on the practice of medicine when his increasing ill health decided him to try the effect of a sea voyage. He accordingly sailed for France in the spring of 1815, and returned in November of that year, but without gaining the benefit hoped for. Hydrothorax came on soon after he landed in New York, and it was three weeks before he was able to reach home. His condition became rapidly worse, and on the morning of December 19, 1815, he was found dead in bed.

Only three days before his death he wrote a memoir on a genus of plants which had been named in honor of him, and requested his nephew, Dr. W. P. C. Barton, to make a drawing to accompany it. The latter did so, and read the memoir at the next meeting of the American Philosophical Society. Dr. Barton was elected to this society January 16, 1789, before his return from his medical studies abroad, and had been one of its vice-presidents since January 1, 1802. The printed Transactions of the society afford abundant evidence of his activity as a member and as a