Bi-centennial history of Albany. History of the county of Albany, N. Y., from 1609 to 1886. With portraits, biographies and illustrations, Part 59

Author: Howell, George Rogers, 1833-1899; Tenney, Jonathan, 1817-1888
Publication date: 1886
Publisher: New York, W. W. Munsell & Co.
Number of Pages: 1452

USA > New York > Albany County > Albany > Bi-centennial history of Albany. History of the county of Albany, N. Y., from 1609 to 1886. With portraits, biographies and illustrations > Part 59

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In recognition of his services, Dr. Swinburne had the rare distinction conferred upon him by the French Government of being made a Knight of the Legion of Honor, also receiving the Red Cross of Geneva. Having finished his labors in the Am- bulance, he resumed his travels, spending his time in different parts of Europe until the fall of 1871, when he returned to his home in Albany.

A predominant feature of Dr. Swinburne's prac- tice has been conservative surgery, especially in the treatment of fractures. Shortly after graduating in medicine he directed his attention to treating fractures upon other principles than those in vogue at that date, and in 1848 he discarded the use of such splints, bandages and apparatus as were gen- erally employed, relying upon extension alone to accomplish the sought-for result. Such a depar- ture was a bold procedure, and after having fully tested and proved his method of treatment, in both private and hospital practice, in 1859 he published in the Transactions Medical Society of the State New York of that year an article on the treat- ment of these injuries by extension. During this year he also reported a case of death by the entrance of air into the uterine sinuses (caused by an abor-

tionist), at which time it was said and believed to be almost the only case of the kind on record .- (Philadelphia Medical and Surgical Reporter, 1859.) In 1861 appeared another paper on the treatment of fractures by simple extension and counter-exten- sion .- (Transactions of the Medical Society of the State of New York, 1861.) In the next year a re- view of the case of the People against Rev. Henry Budge, indicted for the murder of his wife, tried at Oneida, N. Y., in August and September, 1861, in which Dr. Swinburne forcibly criticised the medical testimony of the defense, and combatted the ground assumed by them by numerous experiments .- (Transactions of the Medical Society of the State of New York, 1862.) In the same year he also pub- lished in the Medical and Surgical Reporter of Phila- delphia a synopsis of the trial of Hendrickson, who poisoned his wife by the administration of aconite. This trial also caused much discussion in the medical world, and although the Doctor was severely handled by other professional men for his views as expressed when on the witness stand, he proved his position to have been perfectly correct. In 1863 he published his report to Surgeon-General Hammond, with his experiences in the Peninsular campaign, " Resection of Joints and Conservative Surgery."-(Transactions of the Medical Society of the State of New York, 1863.) In 1864 two more papers in the same journal, one upon "Compound Comminuted Gun- shot Fractures of the Thigh ; the Means for their Transportation and Treatment ;" and the other the "Report of the Committees appointed by the Society to Confer with the Governor and Legisla- ture relative to the Additional Relief of the Sick and Wounded Soldiers from the State of New York." The Doctor also proposed and advocated for the transportation of those suffering from fractures of the leg or thigh a stretcher so arranged that exten- sion and counter-extension could be maintained without pain or discomfort to the patient, or any material alteration of the stretcher .- (Lessons in Hygiene and Surgery, by Dr. Gorden, C. B. ; Transactions of the Medical Society of the State of New York, 1864.) He also strongly advocated the resection of shoulder joints instead of amputation, and many are the grateful letters he has since re- ceived from those whose limbs he saved to them.

In 1863 Dr. Swinburne was elected a permanent member of the Medical Society of the State of New York. In November, 1872, he was chosen president of the Medical Society of Albany County. In 1876 he was chosen Professor of Fractures and Dislocations and Clinical Surgery in the Albany Medical College. He was one of the four surgeons to the Albany Hospital from its foundation up to 1864 ; also consulting surgeon to St. Peter's Hospital, and for a number of years has been surgeon-in-chief of the Homoeopathic and Child's Hospitals. In 1879 he established in the City of Albany a Dispensary for the treatment of all man- ner of diseases and fractures. This Dispensary was established on a humanitarian basis, where the sick, maimed and lame were invited to come and be made whole, without money and without price. From its foundation the Doctor has himself had a

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general supervision of all that was going on, and had as assistants a corps of surgeons trained under his own tuition in conservative surgery. In ad- dition to his large private practice nearly 60,000 people have been treated at the dispensary up to the close of last year, at least 25,000 of these being surgical cases. For the year 1884 the register gives the number of new cases treated as 7, 502, of which 4, 340 were medical cases and the remaining 3, 156 surgical. During the year 250 fractures were treated, 178 of which were of the upper extremities and the remainder of the lower limbs. In the treatment there has not occurred one poor result, a record unequaled by any institution in the annals of surgery. During this period not an amputation of any nature has been performed, the Doctor maintaining that the too frequently indulged in use of the amputating knife is barbarism. His con- servative doctrine is to save the limb and help nature in the work of curing. He has paid out of his private funds upward of $5,000 per annum to carry on his dispensary since its foundation, and now proposes, if the State will not do so, to found a dispensary in addition to the one he now runs for the care and treatment exclusively of injured railroad men.

His career in public life has been almost as marked as that of his professional.

In 1882, the citizens of Albany, irrespective of party, organized to effect a reform in the municipal affairs of the city, and after much persuasion in- duced the Doctor to run as the People's candidate for the mayoralty. The election was a bitterly contested one on the part of the ring, who desired to retain power, and on the part of the citi- zens, who demanded a reform. By a manipulation of ballots the voice of the people was frustrated and his opponent inducted into the office. The frauds, however, were too glaring, and at a public meeting the evening after the results were announced the people there convened decided to commence legal action to set aside the declaration and award the office to Dr. Swinburne. After nearly a year and a half of maneuvering in court by the incumbent's counsel, in taking advantage of the law's delays, the case was finally set for a definite day for trial. As soon as this judicial order was made, the incum- bent, Michael N. Nolan, resigned the office, and Dr. Swinburne, by order of the court, took possession. In the spring of 1884, he was again nominated by the citizens and indorsed by the Republicans, but was again counted out by a small majority. Suffer- ing at the time from blood poisoning, having been infected while performing an operation, he could not and would not consent to a contest for the office in the courts, although his friends were satis- fied they could prove a large majority in his favor, and went west for his health. Returning home with his powers recuperated and his vigor restored, he was greeted with a reception unequaled in previous days, the streets being figuratively a mass of blocked humanity. The citizens again as- sembled, and knowing there was more protection at the ballot box in national than civic elections, and appreciating the worth and ability of the Doctor,

nominated him for Congress. The nomination was indorsed by the Republicans, and when the ballot was counted it was found that he had a majority of 2,504 over the then sitting member, T. J. Van Alstyne, recognized as one of the very strongest men in the district. By this election the political complexion of Albany County was changed over 7,000 votes.

Dr. Swinburne was married in 1847 to Miss Harriet Judson, of Albany, by whom he has had four children, one of whom is living.

SAMUEL BALDWIN WARD.

The ancestry of an eminent physician is always important to those who would intelligently study his career and character. The study will explain what debt he owes to the past and to circumstan- ces, and to what measure he has been the architect of his own fortune. We are all of us sensible enough to know that good birth, in the American significance of the word, is a valuable fact in the same sense in which good health is, and that creditable as unaided effort or the overcoming of difficulties is, they whose equipment for the labor of life has been insured by nurture, counsel and culture are most apt to prove themselves com- pletely competent for the manifold duties of pro- fessional work in the world. The pride of " self- made " men, who are as a rule half-made men, and who invariably worship their creator, is in the fact of their having attained to such a position of strength as will enable them to give to their child- ren the initial advantages which were denied to themselves. No " self-made" man expects his sons to be "self-made " men. He wants them to escape the hardships of their father. He desires to make the beginnings of life easier for them than they were for himself. The conquest of early obstacles is laudable. The necessity to encounter them is regretable. They consume time and effort which must be subtracted from the act of starting.

Both the fact of a sturdy ancestry of achieving freemen and the fact of careful preparation for his profession must be predicated of the cultivated physician and surgeon of whom we write. Lebbeus Baldwin Ward, the father of our subject, who was born in New Jersey, April 7, 1800, and who died in New York City, June 15, 1885, was directly descended through his father from revolutionary soldiery, and though his mother from the celebra- ted Dod family of Newark and Princeton, renowned as teachers and exponents of natural forces, and conspicuously identified with the institu- tions and literature of science. The mother of Dr. Ward, nee Miss Abby Dwight Pratt, of Hatfield, Massachusetts, was descended through both parents from the best Old England and New England stock, and was the daughter of a clergy- man of marked strength of intellect and character. The father of Dr. Ward, whose recent death be- came the occasion of marked tribute to his worth and deeds by the press of the State, was first an engine builder and then a maker of wrought-iron

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forgings, being the founder of the Hammersley Forge Works, at the foot of Fifty-ninth street, New York, on the North River. He was an occupant of many business, judiciary and religious trusts, a member of the State Assembly when the position was honorable in fact as well as in designation, and a Commissioner of the Metropolitan Board of Police, in the first years of its establishment.

Of Revolutionary and Puritan forces the repre- sentative, Samuel B. Ward was born in New York City on June 8, 1842, in the large stone house which his father had built in the English style, near the forge works, as a homestead. Early in life he put forth the evidences of the qualities which have since conspicuously marked him. He was studious, practical, a lover of nature, fond of physical sports and accomplishments. He was generous, unsuspicious and winningly frank. He had the ability to inspire confidence among those with whom he contended for the prizes of youth in manly emulation. The society of an ideal home made his progress in the studies of boyhood easy, inciting and rewarding, and at the age of 16 he entered Columbia College in his native city, well prepared for the course of training to which he was subjected in that institution. He graduated with honors in 1861. Not only did he stand among its first in academic honors, but he was chosen by his classmates to the highest posi- tions within the gift of their friendly suffrages. His scholarship and his popularity were thus attested on the threshold of his active life. After a year of as much study as slower or duller men diffuse into three years, young Ward was appoint- ed a medical cadet in the United States Army. The position enabled him to combine with the continued study of medicine and surgery such clinical instruction and such administrative experi- ence as were extremely valuable. In 1863 he was commissioned by President Lincoln an Acting Assistant Surgeon of the United States Army, and in 1864 an Assistant Surgeon of the United States Volunteers, a little in advance of the completion of his medical studies, which he successfully pursued in the College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York, and in the medical department of George- town University, in the District of Columbia. He was matriculated from the latter school. The army medical experience of Dr. Ward was mainly that comprised by hospital service in Washington, Alexandria and the vicinity. It was such as brought him into contact with a great variety of complaints and injuries. It enabled him to work with and under the ablest minds in his profession. It familiarized him with the relations of govern- ment service to great sanitary undertakings. It devolved large responsibilities on him, and he showed coolness, readiness and resource in meet- ing them.

At the close of the war, though accorded the op- portunity of remaining in the service of the government in the line of his profession, Dr. Ward began the practice of it in his native city. He was made Professor of Anatomy and then of Sur- gery in the Women's Medical College. He met

with decided success in the practice of his profes- sion. His class lectures at the first showed that crispness, aptness and directness, the ability to en- lighten and to incite students, which they possess in marked degree. He was chosen a member of the Northwestern Medical and Surgical Society of the metropolis and was made its secretary. He began and has since continued the contribution of accounts of cases to the Medical Record and to the New York Medical Journal. He became and has remained an active companion of the first class of the Military Order of the Loyal Legion. In 1871, he married the late Nina N. Wheeler, daughter of William A. Wheeler, Esq., of New York City, of whom death bereaved him in October, 1883. Dur- ing his residence in New York Dr. Ward was elected Assistant Surgeon of the famous Seventh Regiment, with the rank of captain, on June 1, 1872, a position he held until June 12, 1876, the year in which he removed to Albany.

The activities and honors of his profession have crowded on this gentleman at the State capital. His position as the Professor of Pathology, Prac- tice, Clinical Medicine and Hygiene in the Medical College of Albany has made him widely known throughout the profession. He has long been the surgeon of the Fifth Brigade, formerly the Ninth Brigade of the State National Guard. He has, since September, 1883, been a member of the Board of Health of the city, and since January, 1885, one of the Civil Service Examiners for State officers. A member of the New York County and Albany County Medical Societies, Dr. Ward has several times been elected a delegate to the American Medical Association, and he is a per- manent member of the State Medical Society. In all the movements of his profession, within the capital or the State, he has been required to become meritedly prominent on the demand of his brethren, while the State and municipal authorities have availed themselves of his knowledge and skill in the counsel they have taken touching large sanitary subjects. He became A. M. by the act of Columbia College, his alma mater, in 1864, and he received the degree of Ph. D. from Union Univer- sity on June 28, 1882. In 1885 he was confirmed by the Board of Regents of the University of the State as a member of the executive committee of the State Normal School, at Albany, in place of the Hon. St. Clair McKelway, resigned.

The citation of the proofs of professional and public preferment could be continued. But enough has been given to serve the purpose of showing that Dr. Ward has won a distinguished position in his profession alike by the concession of its mem- bers and in the opinion of the public. The enumeration of the dignities and trusts he has re- ceived does not touch the question of his personality; neither can the essentially narrative nature of an outline biography do so. Those who stand to him in the relation of personal friends or profes- sional colleagues know that there are few men in the world of so attractive and worthy personal parts, and that his culture, knowledge and judg- ment, developed by study and labor in his own

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HISTORY OF THE COUNTY OF ALBANY.

B.LITTLE.PHIL"

SYLVESTER D. WILLARD, M. D.

land and by study and travel in many foreign countries, are as distinctive and pronounced as are his qualities of fellowship. As the physician and the friend, the best record he has made is in the hearts of those with whose sorrows and joys his own life has been blended. That record is un- reportable and sacredly privileged from the public gaze.

SYLVESTER D. WILLARD, M. D.

Dr. SYLVESTER DAVID WILLARD was born in Wilton, Conn., June 19, 1825, and died in Albany, April 2, 1865. He came of the same family as those eminent divines, the Rev. Samuel Willard and the Rev. Dr. Joseph Willard, the former of whom was a Vice-President and the latter Presi- dent of Harvard College. His father was a highly respectable physician and an honored citizen ; his mother, who was of a much esteemed family of Albany, was a lady of great moral and Christian worth. Young Willard received his literary train- ing at an academy in his native place. In the fall of 1845 he came to Albany, upon invitation of his relative, Dr. Wing, with whom he became a student. He entered the Albany Medical College, graduating therefrom in the winter of 1848.

After serving for some time as an assistant to Dr. Wing, he began practice on his own responsibility, and very early attracted the attention and the confi- dence of that eminent citizen, the late Dr. T. Romeyn

Beck, to whom, perhaps, more than to any other individual, he was indebted for the earliest expres- sions of public respect and confidence that were awarded to him. Shortly after he began practice he became connected with the Albany County Medical Society, and served successively as its secretary, vice-president and president. In 1858 he was a delegate to the State Medical Society, and was appointed its permanent secretary, an office which he signally honored, especially by preparing each successive year, with great ability, a volume of the Society's transactions.

From the opening of the Rebellion, in 1861, his whole heart went into every movement connected therewith ; and, in the spring of 1862, he went, with two other prominent physicians of Albany, to act as a volunteer surgeon to the Army of the Potomac. From Fortress Monroe he proceeded to White House, where he was invested with an important agency in establishing a large field hos- pital, which brought immediate relief to many hundreds of our wounded soldiers. During a brief sojourn there, he suffered the severest hardships of labor and exposure, and contracted a disease which developed itself more fully after his return, and which there is some reason to believe was never entirely dislodged from his constitution. He made one or two attempts afterward to return to this field of labor, but was obliged to abandon his object.

But the most important public enterprise in which Dr. Willard engaged was the establishment

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of an institution for the relief of the chronic insane. His mind had been directed to this sub- ject for a considerable time, and he had collected a vast amount of information bearing upon it, which he had embodied in a luminous and elaborate report. That report had met with a most respectful attention from the Legislature, and everything indicated the speedy carrying out of the plan which he had proposed, when Dr. Willard found that his days of activity on earth were numbered. The Willard Asylum for the Insane, so named as a memorial of him, has been established since his decease. At the time of his death he was holding the positions of Secretary of the State Medical Society, Examining Surgeon for the Pension Office, and Surgeon-Gen- eral of the State, all of which were to him posts of arduous labor and unceasing fidelity. But the duties of these offices, in addition to his more private professional engagements and other diver- sified claims upon his time, imposed upon him a burden greater than his physical constitution was able to bear. A sudden attack of disease, superinduced by excessive exertion, accomplished its fatal work within a very few days. The solemnities of his funeral, as well as the warm memorial tributes of different bodies, including the Legislature of the State, furnished the most un- questionable evidence that his death was regarded as a public calamity.

Dr. Willard's intellectual character was marked by quick perception, sound judgment, retentive memory, and much more than the ordinary power of analysis and investigation. A diligent student of books and a close observer of men and things, he acquired a very large amount of general as well as professional knowledge, and he devoted much time to the local history and biography of the medical profession, the results of which appear in " Albany Medical Annals," Vol. I. He possessed large executive ability, and power of readily bring- ing other minds into harmony with his own. He had, moreover, an exquisite taste, an eye to discern whatever is beautiful in nature or art, and the deli- cacy of his perceptions, especially in regard to architectural proportions, was well-nigh unrivaled. His moral qualities were akin to his intellectual ones. He had great simplicity and directness of character. With him the question, "what is right ?" was all absorbing, and he sought to settle it by light from above and from within, without listening to the pleas of expediency or of imagined self- interest. His spirit was eminently genial and cheerful, and, with his fine intellectual qualities and more than ordinarily attractive manners, rendered him a most agreeable companion. He was, withal, a man of great benevolence. There was a chord strung in his heart that vibrated quickly to every form of human suffering.

But the intellectual and moral qualities with which Dr. Willard was originally endowed were essentially modified in their action by the influences of Christianity. When about sixteen years old, during an extensive revival of religion in his native place, he entered upon the Christian life,

and shortly after he joined the Congregational Church at Wilton, and on his becoming a resident of Albany transferred his membership to the Second Presbyterian Church of this city, which was unbroken during the remainder of his life. For several years he superintended the mission school in Lydius street with great fidelity and success, though it must have been at no small inconvenience, in view of his daily professional engagements. In his med- ical practice he often prescribed for the spiritual as well as the physical man. The grand enterprise for the relief of one of the most terrible forms of human woe, which he had so much at heart in his last days, was evidently prosecuted not merely from considerations of public expediency, nor yet merely or chiefly from the influences of a naturally benevolent spirit, but from those higher principles and feelings which it is the province of Christianity alone to inspire.

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES OF SOME PHYSICIANS.

WILLIAM HOWARD BAILEY was born in Bethle- hem, Albany County, December 28, 1825. He was the seventh child of Dr. Solomon Bailey. When about five years of age his father discontin- ned the active practice of his profession and re- tired to a farm. His father had always manifested a great interest in the education of the young, and was for years the active school officer of the town. His family received his first and continued atten- tion, and to him more than to the schools in the neighborhood were they indebted for their educa- tional foundation upon which to build in after life. After the death of his father, which occurred when he was thirteen years of age, he continued his studies at Albany Academy, the Academy at Utica, the State Normal School at Albany, and the Seminary at Cazenovia. Five years he devoted to teaching. While having the charge of the Union school in Trumansburg, he commenced the study of medicine. He continued it all spare hours during the two years that he had charge of male academy in Cassetor, Alabama. He returned to his native county, attended lectures at the Albany Medical College, from which he graduated in 1853. His mother, living in Utica, induced him to com- mence the practice of his profession there, but in September, 1854, he removed to Albany, where he has been in practice since. He was made mem- ber of the Albany County Medical Society in 1854; was four years its treasurer, delegate to the Medical Society of the State of New York, and President of the County Society; was made a permanent mem- ber of the Medical Society of the State of New York in 1864, and was Secretary of the same from 1865 to 1875. He was elected President in 1880. He received the honorary degree of M. D. from Soule University, Texas, in 1871, and the degree of LL. D., in 1877, from the Washington and Jeff- erson College, Penn. He was elected Alderman of Albany in 1874. In 1882 he was appointed one of the consulting board of the Hudson River State Hospital for the Insane at Poughkeepsie, a

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Bi-centennial history of Albany. History of the county of Albany, N. Y., from 1609 to 1886. With portraits, biographies and illustrations, Part 59

Author: Howell, George Rogers, 1833-1899; Tenney, Jonathan, 1817-1888 Publication date: 1886 Publisher: New York, W. W. Munsell & Co. Number of Pages: 1452

Author: Howell, George Rogers, 1833-1899; Tenney, Jonathan, 1817-1888
Publication date: 1886
Publisher: New York, W. W. Munsell & Co.
Number of Pages: 1452