Willard Parker / [William Chittenden Lusk].

  • Lusk, William Chittenden, 1868-1934.
Date:
[1925]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Willard Parker / [William Chittenden Lusk]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    dogmatic theology, and left his religious enthusiasm free to expend itself in prac¬ tical Christianity. One of his classmates had a strangulated hernia, the local physician called to his aid the celebrated Dr. John Collins Warren, and young Parker was so powerfully impressed with the sagacity and the skill of the sur¬ geon, who speedily reduced the hernia, that he at once resolved to devote his life to the study and practice of the healing art. . . . Shortly after receiving his de¬ gree” (Harvard 1830) “he was appointed Professor of Anatomy in the Berkshire County Medical College at Pittsfield, Massachusetts, at that time one of the leading schools in the country. “In 1832 he was appointed Professor of Surgery in the Pittsfield school, and for four years he held both chairs, lecturing twice daily. In 1836 he moved to Cincinnati, where he was called to the Professorship of Surgery in the Cincinnati Medical College. He remained there for three years. It was during this period that he visited Europe and spent some months in observing the methods of the foremost surgeons of that time in England and France. In 1839 he was called to fill the chair of Surgery in the College of Physicians and Surgeons in this city, and here for more than thirty years he labored with unflagging zeal as a teacher of the principles and practice of surgery. “His fame as a brilliant lecturer and an accomplished surgeon, his noble presence and the wonderful charm of his manner, soon achieved for him all the success to which the highest ambition could aspire, and amid all the temptations of personal popularity and pecuniary ease, he never lost his enthusiasm or abated his labors in behalf of the object which was always nearest his heart, the elevation of the standard and the improvement of the methods of medical education. “In connection with the late James R. Wood, he reorganized the old Alms¬ house at Bellevue into a Hospital, and served there for many years as one of the attending surgeons. He was appointed an attending surgeon of the New York Hospital in 1856. . . . On the establishment of St. Luke’s, the Roosevelt and the Mt. Sinai Hospitals he was made a member of the staff of consulting surgeons in these institutions. Indeed he was so identified with the growth of charitable enterprises, in the way of hospitals and dispensaries in this city, that he was associated with the organization of almost all of them. He was one of the first, and for many years one of the most active members of the Pathological Society and of the Medical and Surgical Society. His deep and abiding interest in this Academy is known to you all. He was one of its honored Presidents. “He resigned the active duties of his Professorship in 1870, and was made Emeritus Professor of Surgery. . . He was made a Doctor of Laws by Princeton College in 1870. “He was essentially a broad man with an unbounded faith in the possibilities of the science of healing and an enthusiasm that disappointment never abated and failure could not quench. He could not be called a learned man, but
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