Hammer, Adam (1818–1878).
Adam Hammer was born in the Grand Duhcy of Baden, Germany, December 27, 1818, and received a thorough preliminary and medical education in the leading German universities. I believe that he graduated at Tuebingen. He was broadly posted and an omnivorous reader, and he delighted in the philosophy of Fichte, Hegel and Kant.
He was ahead of his time, and a rare diagnostician. There is a monogram written by Dr. Adam Hammer detailing his diagnosis upon two living subjects of the occlusion of the coronary arteries of the heart, afterwards verified and confirmed by the postmortem evidences. Nothing can take away from him the fact that he was an efficient and daring surgeon. He did what had been rarely done before; in two cases he had removed the entire upper extremity, including the scapula. Aside from these, he had performed successfully many plastic operations. He was a splendid pathologist, an untiring histologist and microscopist.
Dr. Hammer came to St. Louis in 1848; he had so deplored the outrages of his mother country upon her people that he became a revolutionist, and he was not the first to find out that those who give the first shock to a state are naturally the first to be overwhelmed in its revolution. Hence, he had to leave Germany, and came to St. Louis. He organized the Humboldt Medical College, and through untiring and earnest endeavor erected a college building, just opposite to the City Hospital on the corner of Soulard and Closey street. While he was absent in Europe the college was broken up. He became a professor in Missouri Medical College, and afterwards, broken down in health and ambition, he left St. Louis and returned to Europe, and died there August 4, 1878, about sixty years of age.
Dr. Hammer was clean and square in his dealings, free from any mixture of falsehood; he lacked discretion, but he had the hardy valor of an honorable and courageous man.
His ceaseless industry in acquiring the progressive elements of pathology, surgery and microscopy made him seemingly unceasingly contradictory to those quoting old and antiquated authorities upon these subjects. Hence, he was continually contradicting, and thus seemed to combat, while in reality he was aiming at the laudable purposes of substantiating progress and truth.