Page:American Medical Biographies - Kelly, Burrage.djvu/290

CURTIS 268 CURTIS they practised diaphoretic therapy under any and all circumstances. Their principal remedies were sweat-baths, lobelia and capsicum. Coupled with these fundamental principles of their therapeutic faith was an intense hatred of regular medicine. Samuel Thomson (q. v.), their founder, was a man of talent, but crude and uneducated. C. S. Rafinesque, author of a book on "The Medical Flora of North America" (Philadelphia, 1828), was really the originator of the botanical movement. He was a genius whose strange career puzzled his contemporaries as much as it has been an enigma to posterity. In Cincinnati the physio- medical or botanical practitioners had Alva Curtis to fight for them and their cause. He was a host in himself, tremendously energetic, well educated, a good talker and reasoner and by nature a fighter. That a man of this char- acter should in the course of time become greater than the cause he was fighting for, is not surprising. Throughout his long and strenuous career he kept himself prominently before the people. He locked horns with some of the ablest medical men in this part of the country, John P. Harrison, Roberts Bartholow, M. B. Wright and others. He published the Journal of Education in 1866 and for fully sixteen years the Botanico-Mcdical Recorder (1837-52). With him the cause of physio-medicalism in Cincinnati died, showing that all "systems" in medicine need some ex- traneous support to prevent collapse. His writings were : "Medical Discussions" (1833); "Lectures on Midwifery" (1838); "Theory and Practice of Medicine" (1842); "Medical Criticisms" (1856). Daniel Drake and His Followers, Otto Juettner, M. D., Cincinnati, Ohio, 1909, p. 110-111. Por- trait. Curtis, Edward (1838-1912) Edward Curtis of New York, one of the first to perfect a process of making micro- photographs, was born at Providence, Rhode Island, June 4, 1838. He was a descendant of Henry Curtis, who came to Watertown, Massachusetts, from London, England, in 1636. Edward was the son of George Curtis, a banker, and of Julia Bowen Bridgham Curtis, daughter of the first mayor of Providence. Dr. Curtis attended a private school in New York, graduated from Harvard College in 1859, and began the study of medicine at the College of Physicians and Surgeons, New York, under Dr. Robert Watts, but broke off to enter the army in July, 1861, as medical cadet. In 1863, after two years' service in several army hospitals, he was appointed acting assistant surgeon and was assigned to duty in the microscopical department of the Army Medical Museum (then in its infancy). He found time .to take instruction at the University of Pennsylvania and received an M. D. there in 1864, when he was commis- sioned assistant surgeon and saw field service with the Army of the Potomac, and with Gen- eral Sheridan in the Shenandoah Valley. Re- turning to the museum in the fall of 1864 he assisted with the autopsy on the body of Presi- dent Lincoln, April 15, 1865. Becoming major in 1867, he was engaged in 1869, in conjunc- tion with assistant surgeon J. S. Billings, in one of the earliest investigations undertaken by the medical department of the army, that on the possible connection of vegetable organ- isms with the then prevailing diseases of cattle. During the years of service in the army museums, after the close of the war, Dr. Curtis developed the embryo art of photo- graphing through the microscope; he used wet plates, the only kind then available, but even succeeded in photographing with high powers. Resigning from the army in 1870, Dr. Curtis was appointed clinical assistant to the New York Eye and Ear Infirmary and microscopist to the Manhattan Eye and Ear Infirmary. Soon he became lecturer and then professor (1873) of materia medica and therapeutics at the College of Physicians and Surgeons, a position he held until 1886, when he resigned to give his whole attention to the office of medical director of the Equitable Life Assur- ance Society, to which he had been appointed ten years previously. Dr. Curtis was the author of a "Catalogue of the Microscopical Section of the United States Army Medical Museum," Washington, 1867 ; "An Apparatus for Cutting Micro- scopical Sections of Eyes," Transactions of the American Ophthalmological Society, 1871 ; "Manual of General Medical Technology," N. Y. 1883; "How Neither of Us Was Hanged," a prize story of army medical life, published in the Youth's Companion, Boston, October 21, 1897; also articles on ophthal- mology, materia medica and other subjects in the medical journals and in the Reference Handbook of the Medical Sciences. Dr. Curtis married Augusta Lawler Stacy of Chester, Pennsylvania, in 1864, and they had five children. He died of cerebral hemorrhage at his home in New York, November 28, 1912, at the age of seventy-four. Hist. Coll. of Phys. & Surgs., N. Y., 1912, 410- 413. Portrait, Bibliography.