Industry sign banking maryland medical history myself
you ah President Lincoln's eulogy delivered by the Essex County Medical Society that we mingle our sorrows with those of our fellow citizens at the loss to the nation of a man of pure and honest heart a patriot of the loftiest purpose a ruler wise benignant and beloved with malice towards none and charity towards all his administration of the government during the term of his services commends him to the nation and to the world as possessed of the highest order of statesmanship am in our sorrows for his untimely loss in this crisis of our national affairs we rejoice that we may hand down to the future the name of Lincoln as one of the illustrious names which are born not to die a Society for the Advancement of the profession and promotion of the public good that advertisement in the new york mercury in june 1766 is what I called for a society for the state of New Jersey and it's physicians it was time for doctors of professional standing to band together the war was over in 1763 there were about 88 physicians in New Jersey most in eastern New Jersey there was restlessness in the colonies and almost no hard cash barter had been common from the time of the earliest settlement a doctor's fee might be a quarter of veal a bushel of wheat a few pounds of flax or a watermelon most troublesome to the conscientious practitioner was the wandering quacks who set themselves up as doctors of Medicine charged whatever the traffic could bear and remained only long enough to be found out by patients often too late to be a legitimate physician 17 who agreed so answered and presented themselves at the organizational meeting on July 23rd 1766 as we arrived we introduced ourselves and compared distances traveled and hours spent for these reasons the signatories United and a common purpose for our mutual improvements the advancement of the profession and the promotion of the public good in June 1777 newspapers of the country were asked to publish an announcement declaring the new medical arrangement joined with a humane desire to prevent the repetition of de-stresses which afflicted the brave soldiers to watch over their health and preserve lives most hospitals that were developed were makeshift affairs converting old barns for the infirm dr. James Tilton while serving in Princeton noted that many a fine fellow have I brought in for slight infections and carried out dead of hospital fever finally in Morristown dr. Dylan had cabins built of rough logs somewhat in the style of Indian Hut's ah jockey Hollow a sign of progress to the revolutionary fighter it was here that the care and welfare of the fighting soldier was brought to a higher level there was a fire built in the middle of the ward patients lay with their feet to the fire and their heads against the wall the wards were completely ventilated the smoke contributing to combat infections without giving the least offence to the patient's the bedding in these houses consisted of a bunk or a cradle a sack or a bed tick of course linen filled with straw and a couple of blankets however smallpox which was common among the soldiers needed to be addressed we set up inoculating stations where civilians as well as as soldiers were to apply my dear friend Jim Bell Washington who incidentally took great joy in nicknaming me dear doctor bones after a song I had sung during off-duty hours I wrote to Congress the smallpox has made such head in so many quarters I find it impossible to keep it from spreading through the whole army in the natural way I have therefore D determined to inoculate not only the troops now here but shall order to inoculate the recruits as fast as they arrived in Philadelphia the Medical Society of New Jersey was actually started in 1766 before the Revolutionary War and it's now the oldest continuously operating medical society in any state in the United States that goes back a long ways 1766 but actually the practice of medicine in Essex County began a hundred years before that when the English first arrived on the shores of the Passaic River and founded the town than a village which is now known as Newark and perhaps even two years before that when Englishmen came from Long Island and settled on the west bank of the Arthur Kill to found the town that is now known as Elizabeth it's my pleasure to be able to say a bit this evening about the history of the Essex County Medical Society which as you know was founded in 1816 one of five County medical societies that were established through an act of the New Jersey Legislature that reach our turd the Medical Society of New Jersey on its fiftieth year of existence our society it was inaugurated just after our late war with England which completed the establishment of our national independence we had scarcely recovered from the revolutionary struggle that long and dismal period of alternating hopes and fears and despondency we who had been through the trial by fire for the perpetuation of these principles could appreciate that crisis that had been no time for scientific progress nor was the preceding period of colonial dependence conducive to free inquiry and scientific prosperity thus the society was formed at a most opportune moment in history on June 4th 1816 John Dee Williams Joseph Quimby and I Samuel Manning along with other physicians surgeons met at the home of Moses Roth innkeeper in the town of Newark and formed ourselves into a society under the name the district Medical Society for the county of Essex in the state of New Jersey John Dee Williams was elected president and Joseph Quimby and doctors of Essex County we the doctors of Essex County do solemnly swear do solemnly swear to preserve the standard of excellence in medicine to preserve the standard of excellence in medicine to stand by our colleagues to stand by our olives in carrying out the duties of our Hippocratic oath and carrying out the duties of our Hippocratic oath and to be at the people side and to be at the people side in the fight against disease and human injustice in the fight against disease and human injustice the Civil War is often looked at with sentiment and romance such as scene of the drama Gone with the Wind if the reality was one of extreme carnage and disease which can only be described as complete opposition of the doctor's goal I am dr. dirty I give the experience more in detail because it admirably illustrates the value of the medical stare to our army and the duties performed by the members of the Medical Society I entered military service in 1861 shortly after the Battle of Bull Run during the campaign as it will appear from the extracts from the books in the medical department I was largely instrumental in saving the Army of the Potomac from the dreadful effects of scurvy the outbreak of the Civil War in April 1861 confronted physicians and laymen alike on both sides of the mason-dixon line with the realization that scarcely anyone had first-hand knowledge of war or the medical burdens that would follow five days after the firing on Fort Sumter President Lincoln asked for 3,000 men from New Jersey and 10,000 volunteered within a week physicians of course were among them I am dr. Gabriel grant I practice medicine in Newark New Jersey and entered the United States service in June 1861 as surgeon of the second Regiment 2nd Brigade under command of General Kearney and served with the regiment at the First Battle of Bull Run I also served in Gaines Mills Savage station white oak swamp the Second Battle of Bull Run and attended the wounded at Williamsburg and South Mountain I was sent in May of 1863 by order of general Burnside to Vicksburg to be in charge of the steamer Atlantic this steamer was fitted up with all the appoints of a large hospital surgeons stewards nurses medical and surgical supplies this was the most critical period of the campaign General Grant was invested vicksburg Pemberton had come out of the city to attack him and the enemy and with desperation was throwing every available horse upon the rear and flank of our army the hot southern climate malaria and inadequate supplies made it difficult for the alleviation of the sufferings of the wounded the medical officers suffered extremely from fatigue and the same depressing influences of exposure and climate those fights will probably never be recorded for they are in the shadows but the toilsome March the exhausting care of the sick and wounded and the almost tropical Sun we endure endured by them cheerfully in the consciousness of deserving well of their country and profession as we look back on the Civil War medical treatment and challenges were an everyday obstacle doctors faced there was no general military hospital in the country at the outset of the war we're recuperating wounded and six soldiers could convalesce or not after initial triage and treatment at camp and field hospitals but by the second year of the war close to 200 general military hospitals were in operation one such hospital was the ward United States Army Hospital in Newark Marcus Lafayette Ward a Newark businessman politician and public benefactor rushed off to Princeton to seek authorization from the governor to open a military hospital in Newark under state auspices Ward accepted the offer of a large four-story brick warehouse located between the New Jersey Railroad in the Passaic River at the foot of Center Street Ward traveled to Washington where on June 17th 1862 he secured from the Secretary of War the acceptance of the institution as a u.s. general hospital ward early efforts were recognized by the official designation of the hospital as the ward United States Army General Hospital in 1865 the federal government least some 26 acres of an old estate on the north side of Newark in the three years of its existence the ward hospital treated over 8,000 military patients with 200 deaths with the war over the physicians of Newark could turn their attention to a problem had vexed the city since the early 1850s in the pages of the bulletin the Ward Hospital historian expressed his hope that the military hospital would be at long last followed by a like institution for the poor and indigent of the City of Newark a growing metropolis of over 70,000 people with no hospital although to church-sponsored hospitals st. Barnabas's st. Michael's opened in Newark in the 1860s and the German hospital in the 1870s now Clara Moss it was not until 1882 that a 75 bed Municipal Hospital was opened in a new wing attached to but administered separately from the city almshouse I am dr. Calhoun I entered the service in June of 1861 as assistant surgeon in the 74th New York v regiment of sickles Brigade in July of 18 he won the first deaths from cholera occurred this attack was caused supposedly by a cook having boiled some beans in salt water by July of 1866 68 deaths had been reported I wrote a letter to my mother in which I expressed no fears for myself but the hope that I might die with my harness on as general sickles came into the room I said general I hope I have done my duty it was great consolation to die at my post during the Civil War the bounty system was away for enlistees to pay for someone to replace them after the war money was left over and used to create the Camden City dispensary which was established by the Camden City Medical Society entrepreneurial individuals organized what they called batty associations and in Camden there was a very successful bounty of Association called the North Ward Valley Association and what they did was was to find men who would be willing to fight in the Army in the stead of another individual who would offer up the money that would pay this guy to to go fight the Confederates and it was expensive four or five hundred dollars to get somebody to do that well the northward bounty Association liked all the other bounty associations had this money and sort of invested funds and so on and when the war was over the people who had given money and hadn't found somebody to serve in their stead wanted the money back and northward Valley Association refused to give the money back and the people who were involved sued the northward bounty Association in court demanding a return of their funds well the judge decided that they couldn't have the money back the people who had paid it in they were at that amount of money and the northward bounty Association had to be dissolved and the funds had to be used for some beneficial purpose to the citizens of Cannon County and yes for companies individuals single persons or societies to step forward and offer their services well the Camden County Medical Society did that they said that they would establish a clinic for poor people at six and Federal Street in Camden and they did they built a large building there I have a picture of it in the book here and it was called the dispenser the Camden County Medical Society so it was a it was a good thing that the the doctors the county did and this was also at a time when there was no hospital because the Cooper Hospital hadn't been built Cooper hospital didn't open till 25 or 30 years after the Civil War was over so that facility the dispensary of the Kansas City and Camden County Medical Society was the only place where poor people could go though America was devastated after the war many of the northern states remained intact the South could not say the same the war had taken a terrible toll destroying crops crippling the economy and leaving the citizens destitute since no Civil War battles were fought on New Jersey soil the state was able to focus on industry and economic prosperity it was during this time that prominent New Jersey natives such as Thomas Edison began to revolutionize the world with his inventions most notably the incandescent bulb which led to the boom of the textile industry in Paterson the era of the civil war that was sort of the beginning in America of the Industrial Revolution right here in our neighboring county of Passaic County Paterson the the Silk Mills that were powered by the by the Passaic River and the dye industry that was associated with that and also the the the iron industry iron and steel of course Patterson was a major hub of that there wasn't so much of that in Essex County but Essex County had was brass brass making because of the copper mines in Belleville and these mills extended there was an enormous one in Glen Ridge right now where the where the ball field is on Bloomfield Avenue was a bronze mill at one time and all the disease's that's been off of the working with metal lead poisoning and mercury poisoning particularly men in this area particularly bacon land in Bloomfield and Thomas Edison discovered that you could make extremely hard new products out of phenol and formaldehyde compressed under high pressure and high temperature for sure and they produced the photograph records of Edison and they produce the bakelite that was used as a wood substitute the side effects of it the end the workers and in the neighborhoods downstream the pollution with phenol and and formaldehyde was impressive at that time polychlorinated biphenyls that were produced by General Electric Company originally Thomas Edison's company in Schenectady New York they lined the whole Hudson River to this day we had in the town of orange that was the Hat capital of America maybe the Hat capital of the world mercury poisoning from making hats the Mad Hatter doctors knew what the cause of it was but how to control it was a real problem being new to this country I am just thankful for a job I have five small children and and a wife to feed there are many who go to bed at night hungry so for this I am thankful the others have begun talking about the terrible effects on the solution being used some have become so ill that they never return they begin to shake and some even fall to the ground I cannot think about that some have said that madness is the final result I do not know that is true I pray that it is not but for now I must go back to my work also after the Civil War there were a number of terrible epidemics in southern New Jersey smallpox diphtheria and cholera they had a lot of epidemics of cholera and and physicians particularly there's a physician named Don jeez do ng es who opened a smallpox Hospital in South Camde
and he treated free of charge the number of patients with smallpox during during a terrible epidemic that I guess in the 70s 1870 1880 along in there and saved many lives as a result I think he was a practitioner of vaccination which not everybody agreed upon at that time and he vaccinated hundreds if not thousands of people and and essentially one hand a single handed stopped the smallpox epidemic in his track my grandfather and my father were both physicians and my great-uncle who was killed in a civil war while serving as a regimental surgeon for the Union Army was killed in 1864 was a physician and my grandfather for example took courses in medical school and medical botany and raised his own herbs and he you know digitalis for example is the drug used to treat congestive heart failure well he raised his own digitalis digitalis purpurea and and tried it ground-up grant it up and and made digitalis pills for his patients or a tincture of and so they could drink it and other other drugs that he either grew or blood as as a botanical entity Senate cot for example Senna there's a laxative and castor castor beans and all that sort of thing on the other hand my grandfather was interested in in preserving his patients vision and he developed quite unexpectedly a skill and removing cataracts and in those days you had to wait until the cataract became they used the word ripe it couldn't be too hard or too soft and it had to mature and you had to be able to discern when that magic moment came that you would take the cataract out so what he would do would be to watch the patient closely for a couple of months and as the time approached that he would remove the cataract he would go to a slaughterhouse and get some cows and practice removing the cataract so he gets slick with it he could do it very quickly and he would have somebody in the family hold the patient's head the patient would lie down on a table or the person the whole the patient said and he dropped in a cocaine solution into the eyes and so the eye would be numb and then he had a special little knife that he'd caught all the way around the cornea and lift up the cornea doing this all that's super flank speed and cut out the lens with the cornea back down a couple of sutures and a compression pad and the patient had to lay like that for a week he couldn't move around he couldn't jump up and down and had to stay in that recumbent position because if you sat up or looked down the other way the the cornea would detach and you'd lose the eye at the end of the 19th century and into the beginning of the 20th century appeared a group of practitioners known as homeopaths created by the german physician samuel hahnemann homeopathy which arose in europe believed that like cures like in other words prescribing the indicated drug in minut amounts simultaneously in America a group of practitioners acted outside of the regular thought of medicine known as eclectic or Tom Sounion practitioners name for samuel thompson and new hampshire botanist members of his friendly Botanical Society followed body cleansing treatments utilizing emetics enemas and herbs so offended by these groups the Medical Society of New Jersey stiffened it resolved that any regular practitioner of Medicine even consulting with an alternative medicine society was cause for investigation and possible expulsion so adamant were their feelings in this matter the society took action against even one of its best-known members dr. William a Newell of Allentown despite his eminence dr. Newell had served two years as governor of New Jersey in 1847 and was elected to Congress he befriended Abraham Lincoln and became Lincoln's family physician his colleagues did not hesitate to investigate and charge him with consulting a Tom Sonia the State Board of Medical Examiner's was created in 1890 with the influence of dr. Wells P Eagleton of Essex County a new acceptance of homeopathic medicine was embraced and the statute called for five regular physicians three homeopathic physicians and one eclectic or Tom Sounion physician by 1910 New Jersey's homeopathy and Tom Soehn ian's were welcomed into the ranks of regular medicine all three United in opposition to the new threat of Osteopathy gentlemen I've asked you here today for a very simple reason for many years as you know the gap between our society's way of practicing medicine and the way of those who prefer alternate means has been substantial it is no secret that there is a great deal of animosity dare I say even disdain for those who follow the thoughts of the tomassoni ins and the homeopathy I am proposing to you in light of recent developments that we change our approach to said disciplines now I am NOT in support of loosening our morals or our standards however it is undeniable that in the past two generations many points of view have become increasingly similar and they coincide with a desire to heal therefore gentlemen it is my hope that you take up a new role that of older brother and invite these groups into our organization by doing so I propose that we shall instead safeguard public health by requiring all those who wish to call themselves men of medicine to pass the board of medical examiners tests thus giving them the licence to call themselves doctor the osteopaths came one around the turn of the century in 1919 five long in there and at that time the conflict with the homeopaths had been completely resolved there's no more concern about it that they were members of the Medical Society both at this local the state and the national level so it wasn't a problem anymore but the osteopath had a philosophy of treatment of patients that disease resulted from maladjustments in the skeletal system clearly that's that isn't scientific cracking someone's back or shoulder or neck or whatever is not legitimate approach to the treatment of diphtheria say for example or tuberculosis or psychotic state or acute appendix anything it's just not it's not scientific and really doesn't have any value for patient except possibly as a placebo after the first world war the the osteopath began to gain strength and and pushed their their style of treating patients and as I said the medical community resisted and fought back the problem for the regular physicians was that the osteopathic community by mid-century nineteen forty fifty 1960 had begun to do the exactly the same thing that the homeopaths have done they began to adopt modern science as the basis of their practice they gradually dropped off the practitioners who thought that manipulation of the spine was the the only appropriate treatment for an osteopathic physician to offer to a patient and they began to accept a science of medicine so that they were becoming more and more and more like scientific physicians who to practice using the concepts of modern medical science one of the most disastrous pandemics of the earlier 20th century was the Spanish flu named for its place of origin while some say the carriers docked first in Boston others say it was New York either way and than 100 days the disease killed 12,000 civilians in New Jersey while the Great War was known to kill 53,000 Americans in combat influence acclaimed 530,000 victims compounding the problem was the critical shortage of physicians and other medical personnel historian dr. George Hill speaks of the epidemic of course the influenza epidemic happened at the end of World War 1 1917 began 1918 it was big time 1919 petered out in 1920 influenza had been around before that it's a virus disease and and it's with us to this day but for some reason there's still unknown the influenza virus that came at that time was particularly very wound it also had a way to migrate around the world at that time for the first time we had mass movements of people we had mass movements of troops of refugees so that what would ordinarily in a you know very little epidemic like that have been localized in fact spread the very nature of war between 1939 and 1945 forced those of us in medicine to rush forward the pace of advancement in science penicillin which had been discovered much before the war to end all wars was now needed on an industrial scale it was a weapon so effective treating everything from staph infections to pneumonia that within a decade once deadly diseases were no longer cause for panic penicillin used on d-day was found to be especially integral against gangrene and other infirmities after I was discharged from the Marines honorably to go to medical school then I was called to active duty that was the time when all male doctors who were fit were called to active duty and one branch of service it was the Public Health Service that took me when I was two years at the National Institutes of Health with some very interesting duty there the Cuban Missile Crisis happened during that period and we were all told that our unit the infectious disease unit would be landing in Cuba if the crisis didn't end when they expected us not to come home very sobering for a young person with a family so I learned at that point that anyone in uniform may go in harm's way any time after I was done my time in the Public Health Service I was allowed to transfer to the Navy and during my Navy time I was had many very interesting experiences I twice volunteered and went to Vietnam was probably the last Navy surgeon ever to do an operation in Vietnam and after I came back from Vietnam I was really motivated I went to US Army Airborne School and became the first Navy medical officer to qualify as a Navy and Marine Corps parachutist other jobs along the way included some very responsible jobs with the North Atlantic Treaty operation NATO exercises and also five years of the Pentagon and three years at the National Naval Medical Center I was there during the first Gulf War very anxious period I was chairman of the disaster preparedness committee and we were prepared for truly mass casualties that were expected from the first Gulf War so my military experience all started with the Marines and it ended with the Marines I'm still a marine but I'm glad to be here tonight and talk about it you
