Page:American Medical Biographies - Kelly, Burrage.djvu/428

FOWLER 406 FOWLER uating at the Philadelphia Medical School in 1856, in 1858 he took a post-graduate course in medicine and settled in Portland in 1859. He served briefly during the Civil War, and was afterwards appointed chief pension ex- aminer. He was a member of the Maine Medical Association, once serving as its presi- dent, and was instructor in anatomy and physiology in the Portland School for Medi- cal Instruction for several years. His large obstetric practice placed him in the front in that branch of medicine, and he was the first physician in Maine to do a successful Cesarean section. May 22, 1870. He contributed to the "Transactions of the Maine Medical Association" numerous papers on obstetics, physiology, and mental diseases, and was also interested in the co-education of the sexes. He would have been pleased to live in the twentieth century when psychi- cal medicine has so boldly come to the fore. He was a great friend of John Fiske, the learned historian and psychologist, and en- couraged him to read in Portland his re- markable lectures on American history. Like Fiske, he believed that death is the end of all, and that there was nothing afterwards. Dr. Foster was married three times and had seven children, two of his sons, Barzillai Bean and Charles Wilder, becoming doctors. A man highly thought of by everyone in the profession, he was often chosen a delegate to the meetings of medical associations as a representative. He was rather short and spare, walked with a quick step, had a sandy head of hair, and beard trimmed short. The bent of his mind is best shown by the ' subjects chosen bj' him for prize essays to be written by the members of the associa- tion : "Physiology of Habit" ; "Habits Which Endanger Health" ; "Hygiene of Country Towns and Villages" ; "Hereditary Causes of Disease." He had a very firm belief in the influence of mind upon the body, as demonstrated in the dealings which he had with the lives of many families and practitioners. After a long illness, he died suddenly from chronic Bright's disease November 27, 1896, ending a life which all could recall with pleasure. James A. Spalding. Trans. Maine Med. Astioc. Personal Reminiscences. Fowler, George Ryerson (1848-1906). George Ryerson Fowler, surgeon, was bor.i in New York City, December 25, 1848, son of Thomas Wright (1825-1897) and Sarah Jane Carman Fowler, both natives of Long Island, as was also his grandfather, Duncan B. Fowler, who participated in the war o( 1812. The family is of English origin, the Ameri- can branches descending from three brothers who were among the early settlers of Con- necticut, and two of whom later removed to Long Island, one settling on the northern shore and the other on the southern. From the former Dr. Fowler's father was descended, while his mother, a resident of Brooklyn, was a descendant of the latter. He received his early education in a public school at Jamaica, Long Island, where his par- ents settled in 1856. It being the wish of his father, who was a master mechanic of the Long Island Railroad, that he become versed in all technical knowledge pertaining to rail- road management, at the age of thirteen George entered the local office of the road, and after spending over a year in the study of telegraphy and in familiarizing himself with the general duties of a station agent, became an apprentice in the machine shop of the company. Having early evinced a taste for anatomical study, however, at the end of his apprenticeship in 1866 he abandoned the railway profession and accepted a situa- tion in the manufacturing business of Clar- ence Sterling of Bridgeport, Connecticut, where he could avail himself of the opportuni- ties which were aflForded for scientific study, under the encouragement of Mr. Sterling. After a year's service he had saved sufficient funds to enable him to enter the Bellevue Hos- pital Medical College, New York City, from which he was graduated M. D. in 1871, having at intervals of service meanwhile earned the needed money to complete the course. He at once entered upon the practice of his pro- fession in the eighteenth ward, Brooklyn, sub- sequently removing to the twenty-first ward, and pursued a general practice of medicine and surgery for fifteen years. From that time until his death he gave his attention exclu- sively to surgery and had one of the largest practices in his field on the American continent. He was a member of the staff of the Cen- tral Dispensary, 1872-74; the first visiting surgeon to the Bushwick and East Brooklyn Dispensary on its organization in 1878, pre- siding officer of its medical staff until 1887, and consulting surgeon, 1887-1906: surgeon to the Methodist Episcopal Hospital from its foundation in 1887; visiting surgeon to St. Mary's Hospital from its organization in 1889