American Medical Biographies/Anderson, Washington Franklin
Anderson, Washington Franklin (1823–1903)
Washington F. Anderson, for forty-six years a practitioner in Salt Lake City, Utah, was born in Williamsburg, Virginia, January 6, 1823, of English, Scotch and Irish ancestry, though his parents and grandparents were Americans. He attended medical lectures at the University of Virginia in 1841–1842, and the University of Maryland in 1843–1844, graduating from the latter in the last year.
He was a resident student of the Baltimore Almshouse Hospital from 1842 to 1844, where he had unusual privileges in dissection, post-mortem examination and pathology. Among the latter were studies in remittent fever, made with Dr. Charles Frick of Baltimore and published in the April number of the American Journal of the Medical Sciences, 1846.
He practised in Mobile, Alabama, until the Mexican War in 1846, when he joined the Alabama regiment and served in the ranks as orderly sergeant of his company. He finally settled in Salt Lake City and practised there until his death in 1903, doing much, with two physicians of recognized ability, Dr. John Milton Bernhisel and Dr. William France, an English physician, to maintain the integrity of the medical profession in Utah.
In 1876 Anderson was elected president of the first medical society in Utah.
He had an extensive practice in surgery. Cases of urinary calculi in young and old seem to have been very common; for many operations the necessary instruments were remodeled or fashioned by crude mechanics, the procuring of medical and surgical appliances from New York meaning months of waiting and uncertain transportation across the desert.
In 1881, when aseptic surgical technic was in its infancy, he performed a laparotomy for the removal of a large ovarian cyst, this being probably the first operation of the kind performed in Salt Lake City, the patient making a good recovery.
In 1862 he married Isabella Evans. Thirteen children, four boys and nine girls, were born, and three daughters received medical degrees from the University of Michigan.
He died in Salt Lake City, August 21, 1903.