Joseph Pancoast / [W.S. Miller].

  • William Snow Miller
Date:
1930
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Joseph Pancoast / [W.S. Miller]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    Reprint from SURGERY, GYNECOLOGY AND OBSTETRICS May, 1930, pages 921-923 ROY Com MASTER SURGEONS OF AMERICA JOSEPH PANCOAST WILLIAM SNOW MILLER, M.D., Sc.D., Madison, Wisconsin i JOSEPH PANCOAST, the son of John and Anne (Abbott) Pancoast, was born near Burlington, New Jersey, November 23, 1805. Nothing is known of his early education. In 1828, he graduated from the medical department of the University of Pennsylvania and immediately began the practice of medicine in Philadelphia, specializing in surgery. In 1830, the Philadelphia Association for Medical Instruction was formed. This was a quiz organization which consisted at first of Drs. Parish, Wood, S. G. Morton, John R. Barton, and Franklin Bache. Later Joseph Pancoast was connected with the organization. It was, however, short lived, for at the end of six years it disbanded. The Philadelphia School of Anatomy was opened by Dr. James Valentine O’Brien Lawrance in 1820. He died in 1823 and the school passed into the hands of the gifted Dr. John D. Godman. In 1826 Godman went to Rutgers College as professor of anatomy and Dr. James Webster assumed charge of the school. Webster accepted in 1830 the chair of anatomy in the Geneva Medical College and in 1831 Joseph Pancoast, the fourth to take charge of this celebrated school, began his brilliant career as an anatomist and surgeon. On October 7, 1835, he was elected physician to the Philadelphia Hospital (Blockley), and soon after physician-in-chief to the Children’s Hospital in the same Institution; from 1838 to 1845 he was one of the visiting surgeons to the same hospital. In 1838 he was called to the chair of surgery in the Jefferson Medical College, made vacant by the retirement of Dr. George McClellan, and gave up his charge of the Philadelphia School of Anatomy. During the seven years he was connected with the school of anatomy he de¬ voted much time to study and writing. In 1831, he translated Lobstein’s De nervi sympatheci humanifabrica et morbis, Paris, 1823. This treatise contains an account of the first case of Addison’s disease on record, though it was not recognized as a distinct disease until Addison published, in 1855, his classical work on the diseases of the suprarenal capsules (Henry). Later he edited Manec’s Great Sympathetic Nerve and his Cerebrospinal System in Man, and fitly closed his career in the school of anatomy by editing, in 1838, a new edition of Wistar and Horner’s Anatomy, to Copyright, 1930, by Surgical Pub. Co. of Chicago
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