American Medical Biographies/Meigs, Charles Delucena
Meigs, Charles Delucena (1792–1869)
Charles Delucena Meigs was the fifth of the ten children of Josiah Meigs, sixth in descent from Vincent Meigs who came from Dorset, England, and settled in Connecticut about 1647. He got his middle name from his mother's brother, Charles Delucena Benjamin, who had been named for a Spanish gentleman, a friend of his father, Col. John Benjamin of Stratford, Conn. Charles was born February 19, 1792, on the island of St. George, Bermuda, where his father, a Yale graduate, had gone to practise as a proctor in the courts of admiralty. The father soon tired of his work, returned to New Haven and was elected professor of mathematics and natural philosophy at Yale. In 1801 his father had to superintend the erection of the buildings of the University of Georgia and the whole family finally settled in Athens, where Charles went to the grammar school and learned French from Petit de Clairvière, a cultivated emigré. He graduated at the University of Georgia in 1809 and began that same year to study medicine under Dr. Thomas Fendall, serving as apothecary boy and being sent out to cup and leech by his master. He took his M. D. degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1817.
After his marriage to the daughter of William Montgomery, a cotton merchant in Philadelphia, he settled to practise first in Augusta, but afterwards in Philadelphia, quickly obtaining, not practice, but the intimacy and esteem of men like La Roche, Hodge, Bond, Bache, Wood and Bell. He was one of the first editors of The North American Medical and Surgical Journal (in 1826), and found time to translate and publish Velpeau's "Elementary Treatise on Midwifery," and seven years later he issued his "Philadelphia Practice of Midwifery." a work showing the bent of his mind to be towards obstetrics. In 1837 with Drs. Gerhard, Houston and Ryan, he was appointed by the College of Physicians to act with a committee of the trustees of the estate of Dr. Jonas Preston to found the "Preston Retreat."
Meigs drew special attention to cardiac thrombosis as a cause of those sudden deaths which occur in childbed and previously generally attributed to syncope. In this connection T. Gaillard Thomas says: "It has been remarked that Meigs just escaped the honor which is now and will be hereafter given to Virchow for a great pathological discovery," and Meigs himself said, "I have a just right to claim the merit of being the first writer to call the attention of the medical profession to these sudden concretions of those concresible elements of the blood in the heart and great vessels." It may be said he did not follow his discovery into detail as regards secondary deposits of emboli, nor did he assert such a claim.
As professor of obstetrics at Medical College (1841–1861) he worked hard in everything connected with his branch, studying German until he was able to read with ease the most important German obstetricians.
His books, all written in the midst of most fatiguing obstetrical and general medical practice and lecturing, were a remarkable example of what the human machine can accomplish. Consistent with his idea that men ought to retire before losing the power of judging their own fitness for duty, he sent in his resignation when he was sixty-seven, a resignation unwillingly accepted by the dean, faculty and students. He had a dramatic style of lecturing that held the attention of his hearers and he lectured on the Augustan age of Roman literature as well as on obstetrics.
The doctor's robe cast off, he donned that of the bibliophile, and joyfully spent his newly acquired leisure at his country house, Hamanassett, among his old books. Blacksmithing, carpentry and drawing and painting engaged part of the attention of this versatile man. His son says that he was a good amateur at both painting and modeling in clay and wax. Gradually failing health with gastrodynia made him a not unwilling traveller, when, one night, the twenty-second of June, 1869, he set out, without waking, on his last journey.
His best known publications are: "Woman, Her Diseases and Remedies," 1847; "Obstetrics, the Science and Art," 1849; "Treatise on Acute and Chronic Diseases of the Neck of the Uterus," 1850; and "On the Nature and Treatment of Childbed Fevers," 1854. In 1851 he wrote a forty-eight page memoir of Samuel George Morton and in 1853 a biographical notice of Daniel Drake, of thirty-eight pages.
His appointments numbered among others: fellowship of the College of Physicians, Philadelphia, and presidency from 1845–1855; and professor of obstetrics and diseases of women and children in Jefferson Medical College, 1841.