Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 9.djvu/122

104 of the Buffalo Medical Journal, which was founded by his father in 1846, and ultimately transferred to New York and merged in the American Medical Monthly.

In 1858 Dr. Flint was appointed one of the attending surgeons of the Buffalo City Hospital. The same year he became Professor of Physiology in the Medical School of Buffalo. In 1859 he removed with his father, and was appointed Professor of Physiology in the New York Medical College, delivering a course of lectures in 1859-'60. In 1860 he received the appointment of Professor of Physiology in the New Orleans School of Medicine, delivered a course of instructions in 1860-'61, and resigned the position at the breaking out of the war. While in New Orleans he experimented on alligators, and developed some important points with reference to the influence of the pneumogastric nerves upon the heart. He also made some experiments there upon the recurrent sensibility of the anterior roots of the spinal nerves. He was the first physiologist in this country to operate upon the spinal cord and the spinal nerves in living animals.

In the spring of 1861 Dr. Flint went to Europe, and studied several months with Charles Robin and Claude Bernard, with the former of whom he had close friendly and scientific relations, and maintained a frequent correspondence. Prof. Robin presented his memoir, "Sur une nouvelle fonction au foie" ("On a New Function of the Liver"), to the French Academy of Sciences for the Month yon prize without the knowledge of the author. In 1863 Dr. Flint made some important experiments upon the blood, employing a new mode of analysis for its nitrogenized constituents. He was one of the founders of the Bellevue Hospital Medical College, in 1861, and has been from the first, as he still is, Professor of Physiology and Secretary and Treasurer of the Faculty. He was also for eight years Professor and Lecturer on Physiology in the Long Island College Hospital of Brooklyn.

In 1862 Dr. Flint made some remarkable observations on the excretory function of the liver, published in the American Journal of the Medical Sciences, in October, 1863; translated into French, and presented by Robin to the French Academy of Sciences for the "Concours Monthyon" and which received honorable mention and a recompense to the author of 1,500 francs in 1869. The important discovery put forth in this memoir was the production of cholesterine in the physiological wear of the brain and nervous tissue, the elimination of cholesterine by the liver, and its discharge in the form of stercorine in the faces. It was established that the new substance (stercorine) results from the transformation of cholesterine in the faces. The diseased condition caused by the retention of cholesterine in the blood (cholesteræmia) is now recognized as a very important pathological fact. Dr. Flint's laborious researches and interesting conclusions upon this subject have been lately confirmed in Germany by experiments