Page:American Medical Biographies - Kelly, Burrage.djvu/1053

SEILER 1031 SEILER the idiot's eye, and his last enterprise was the establishment in the City of New York of a "Physiological School for Weak-Minded and Weak-Bodied Children." He died October 28, 1880, at the age of sixty-eight years. Walter L. Burrage. Med. Caz., N. Y., Dec. 4, 1880, vol. vii, 681. Amer. Jour. Med. Sci., 1881, vol. xxvii, 421-425. Med. Rec, N. Y., Nov. 6, 1880, vol. xviii, 531- 532. Phys. & Surgs. of U. S., W. B. Atkinson, Phila., 1878, 252. Seller, Carl (1849-1905) Carl Seiler of Philadelphia, laryngologist, was born in Switzerland, April 14, 1849, and died at his home in Reading, Pennsylvania, October 10, 1905, at the age of fifty-six years. He was educated at the Universities of Berlin and Pennsylvania, studied medicine in Vienna, Heidelberg and Philadelphia, and took his degree of M. D. in 1871 at the University of Pennsylvania. His mother, Mme. Emma Seiler, was a woman of strong personality, a noted authority and writer on the voice. She published two books which had a large circulation, originally written in German and later translated into English by W. H. Furness, D. D., a member of the American Philosophical Society of Philadelphia, of which she also was a mem- ber. The "Voice in Singing" appeared in Philadelphia in 1868, soon after she came to this country. The "Voice in Speaking" was published in the same place in 1875. The pref- ace of the former book contains letters from Helmholtz, the celebrated professor of physi- ology in Heidelberg whom she had assisted while he was writing his essay on the forma- tion of vowel tones and the registration of the female voice, and from Du Bois-Raymond, professor of physiology in Berlin, who called her "a lady of rare scientific attainment and one to whom we owe a more exact knowl- edge of the position of the larynx and of its parts in the production of the human voice." In the volume on the "Voice in Speak- ing" she refers to her son's helping her in her studies of sound. Undoubtedly her influ- ence must have inclined him to take up the medical study of the larynx and perhaps even suggested to him a subject for his gradu- ation thesis, which was the "Physiology of the Voice." After getting his M. D. he began general practice in Philadelphia, paying special atten- tion to what was then called laryngoscopy (laryngology), at first as an office student of Dr. J. Solis-Cohen and afterwards his assist- ant. Later he was lecturer on laryngoscopy from 1877 to 1895 and chief of the throat dispensary at the hospital of the University of Pennsylvania for nearly twenty years. He was also laryngologist to the German Throat Infirmary and physician-in-chief to the Union Dispensary. Besides his special clinical work he was a member of the Pathological Society of Phila- delphia and recorder of the Biological and Microscopical Section of the Academy of Nat- ural Sciences. In this connection he published a "Compendium of Microscopical Technology," Philadelphia, 1881. In 1879 he was elected a member of the American Laryngological Asso- ciation and was at one time its vice-president. He was also secretary of the laryngological section of the American Medical Association. The results of his large experience he re- corded in what became a standard text-book, recommended as such as late as 1900 in the catalogue of the medical department of the University of Pennsylvania. It has the title "Handbook of Diagnosis and Treatment of Diseases of the Throat and Nasal Cavities," Philadelphia. 1879. This was followed by three other editions, much enlarged, the last one in 1893. In this work the chapters on the anatomy and physiology of the larynx and the use of the voice show the influence of his mother's teaching. As a surgeon he was ingenious, inventive and original. He devised several instruments for operations upon the nasal septum and turbinates and was the first to suggest a tubular splint, later developed by Asch (q. v.). What brought him his greatest notoriety perhaps was a formula for an alkaline and antiseptic wash for the nose. In the first two editions of his book he had advised the use of the so-called Dobell's solution, but in his third edition, 1889, page 168, he says that he finds many patients object to the odor of carbolic acid, one of the ingredients of Dobell's solution, and in order to obviate this he had prepared instead a similar solution with a pleasant odor. This contained ten ingredi- ents beside water. Desiring something more easily carried about, he had the formula made into compressed tablets, with the result that the name of Seller's Tablets is now known to every one who has occasion to use or prescribe a nasal solution. Owing to illness in his family, he left Phil- adelphia in 1897 and lived in Scranton, Penn- sylvania, from 1898 until 1902, going subse- quently to Reading, Pennsylvania, where he died in 1905. He married, in 1876, Carrie G. Linn, daugh-