Dr. Abraham Jacobi / [Fielding H. Garrison].

  • Fielding Hudson Garrison
Date:
1919
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Dr. Abraham Jacobi / [Fielding H. Garrison]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    DE. ABEAHAM JACOBI (1830-1919) Dr. Abraham Jacobi, the father and founder of American pediatrics, died at his summer home at Bolton Landing, N. Y., on July 10, at the age of eighty-nine years. Dr. Jacobi was born of Jewish parents in the village of Hartum, Westphalia, on May 6, 1830. His people were not well-to-do, his edu¬ cation was accomplished through privation and struggle, but he early acquired a knowledge of Latin, and, after the usual courses of instruc¬ tion in the village school and the Gymnasium at Minden, he went to the University of Greifswald, in 1847, at the age of seventeen, to matriculate as a student of Oriental languages. Becoming interested in medicine, he turned to anatomy and physiology. Following the peri¬ patetic plan of the German student, he pro¬ ceeded to Gottingen, where he came under Frerichs and Woehler, winding up his course at Bonn, where he graduated in 1851, with a Latin dissertation “ Cogitationes de vita rerum naturalium,” which has considerable philo¬ sophic depth. In the meantime, the Devolu¬ tion of 1848 had broken out and run its course, and in this brief drive for liberty, Jacobi, with Ferdinand Freiligrath, Karl Marx, Carl Schurz and others, had been a leading spirit. When he went to Berlin, to take his state examina¬ tion, he was apprehended by the Prussian au¬ thorities, imprisoned for a year and a half in a German fortress at Cologne, convicted of lose majeste, and again held in detention for six months at Minden. In 1853, through the friendship of his jailer, he managed to escape, took ship at Hamburg, and after some vicissi¬ tudes in England and New England, settled down to practise at 20 Howard Street, New York. Here, beginning with such modest fees as 25 and 50 cents for office and house visits, five to ten dollars for obstetric cases, he soon managed to make a living. In the first year of his practise, he made $973.25. During the next year (1854), he invented a laryngoscope of his own, which was unfortunately not ever pat¬ ented or made public before the appearance of Manuel Garcia’s instrument (1855). By 1857, Jacobi was lecturing on pediatrics in the Col¬ lege of Physicians and Surgeons of New York. This was the starting point of clinical and scientific pediatrics in this country. In this branch of medicine, J acobi had only one other American colleague (in no sense a rival or competitor), the devoted and unworldly J. Lewis Smith, whose famous treatise of 1869 passed through eight editions. In 1860, Jacobi was called to the first special chair of diseases of children in the New York Medical College; in 1861, Smith became clinical professor of pediatrics in the Bellevue Hospital College. In 1865, Jacobi took the clinical chair of his subject in the medical department of the Uni¬ versity of New York. In 1870, he became clin¬ ical professor of pediatrics in the College of Physicians and Surgeons (1870-99). Officially, he taught pediatrics in New York for nearly half a century, actually, all his working life. In 1862, Jacobi established a pediatric clinic in the New York Medical College Building in East 13th Street, which ran for two years. In this way, bedside teaching in pediatrics ante¬ dated bedside teaching in internal medicine in the United States. Meanwhile, Jacobi had been an active and brilliant contributor to medical literature. In 1859, he published a volume of “ Contributions to Midwifery and Diseases of Women and Children,” with Emil Noeggerath,1 who was i Author of the now well-established theory of the latency of gonorrhoea in unsuspected carriers (1872), which has been of great moment in the sci¬ ence of causation of pelvic disease in women.
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