Parrish, Isaac (1811–1852)
Isaac Parrish was born March 19, 1811. His father was Dr. Joseph Parrish (q. v.), and his mother Susanna Coxe. He was educated in the Friends School, which had numbered among its pupils his father and Drs. James, Wistar, Physick and Dorsey.
His medical studies were begun with his father in 1829, and were continued at the University of Pennsylvania, where he graduated in 1832, afterwards spending a year in Blockley Hospital.
In February, 1834, a month before the institution was open for patients, Parrish was appointed a surgeon at Wills Hospital, where he served eighteen years until his death in 1852.
Parrish's best piece of work is "Remarks on Spinal Irritation as Connected with Nervous Diseases," published in The American Journal of the Medical Sciences, 1832, vol. x, pp. 294–314. It gives personal experience of cases in the Philadelphia Almshouse, and seeks to establish a rational basis for the classification of the various neuroses.
In 1834 he married Sarah Redwood Longstreth, daughter of Samuel Longstreth, a Philadelphia merchant.
Parrish died in his forty-second year, July 31, 1852.