Preserve your Love for Science: Life of William A Hammond, American Neurologist

by Bonnie Ellen Blustein

• ISBN13: 9780521528436
• ISBN10: 0521528437
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2002-07-25
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• More Book Details

Summary

William Alexander Hammond, M. D. (1828-1900), one of the most successful American physicians of the nineteenth century, was first recognized in the 1850s as a natural history collector and as an original investigator in physiological chemistry. Appointed surgeon general of the United States Army in 1862, he supervised a sweeping reorganization of the Medical Department along lines of centralization and efficiency. Some of his more controversial projects, however, provided Hammond's political enemies with the opportunity to engineer his court-martial and dismissal from the army in 1864. He then established himself in New York as an exclusive specialist in neurology, one of the first in the country. In this first full-length biography of a major nineteenth-century American medical personality, Bonnie Ellen Blustein shows how Hammond developed his specialty practice as a vehicle for pursuing broad scientific interests within the limits set by the solo-practitioner structure of the medicine of his day.

Table of Contents

List of illustrations

Acknowledgments

1. Introduction

2. 'I can make any post interesting'

3. 'The first original physiologist in the United States'

4. 'The best friend the soldier has'

5. 'Foggy with embarrassments'

6. 'A New York medical man'

7. 'A laborious and skilful observer'

8. 'So great her science'

9. 'Systems of cures and wonderful remedies'

10. 'A positive mental science'

11. 'All men are insane'

12. 'I said that I would be back'

13. 'Very near being a great man'

Notes

Note on sources

Bibliography of William Alexander Hammond, M. D.

Index.