Page:A cyclopedia of American medical biography vol. 2.djvu/130

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LONGWORTH


110


LOOMIS


lated in the Medical College of Ohio, but in the fall went to New York, where he entered the College of Physicians and Surgeons. In 1873 he graduated, taking the faculty prize for a thesis on " The Ligature of the External Carotid," which was later published in the "Archives of Scientific and Practical Medicine," May, 1873. After graduation he again visited Germany, going iirst to Vienna, where he sat under Hebra; studied the ophthal- moscope with Jaeger and Arlt, the laryn- goscope with Schrotter and Stoerck, and enjoyed the benefits of the many practi- cal courses in operative surgery. After one term in Vienna he went to Stras- burg to study histology. There he en- tered the laboratory of Waldeyer, and took the courses of V. Recklinghausen, and while there published his " Discover- ies of the Nerve Terminations in the Con- junctiva" in the "Archiv. fi'u- Micro- scopische Anatomie" of Max Schultze. Returning home in the Fall of 1874, he was immediately chosen assistant dem- onstrator in the Medical College of Ohio and lecturer on dermatology and pathol- ogist to the Good Samaritan Hospital. He was adjunct professor of anatomy and clinical surgery in the Medical College of Ohio in 1875 and professor in the same chairs from 1876 to 1879, also pathologist to the Cincinnati Hospital from 1876 until his death. Surgery and dermatology were his specialties, and he rapidly built up a practice but soon after gave it up and devoted himself exclusively to scien- tific investigation. With characteristic energy he turned his house into a med- ical w'orkshop, retaining only two rooms for non-medical work — his sleeping apart- ment and a music room; the latter a place where all the better musicians of the city were in the habit of meeting.

It was in this house that Dr. Long- worth began his work on photography, injection, and the electric light. The process of photography of microscopic preparations he developed, by means of a new apparatus, to such an extent that all his results were satisfactory — results that would have been given to the world in a


short time, if he had lived, in the form of a work on microscopic anatomy. The methods which he used were described fully in a lecture given by him before the Academy of Medicine of Cincinnati, May 18, 1878, entitled " Hints on Improve- ments in Micro-Photography." During his last year his whole time was taken up by injecting, and the electric light. He devised a new instrument for injecting, his injection mass being his own in- vention.

In the last session of the college he used the electric candle for his demonstrations in anatomy, and had just completed the construction of a lantern, by means of which he could throw the images of solid bodies upon the screen, thus enabling him to perform dissections of organs, such as the brain, before a class of 350, showing each and all of them every step, by means of the large picture thrown upon the screen. In his studies on elec- tricity he went so far as to construct a new electric candle, for which he was granted a patent, May 21, 1878.

Dr. Longworth was never married.

On the fifth of January, 1879, he was taken ill with pneumonia, and died on the fourteenth. A. G. D.

From an address by Dr. F. Forchheimer, read at the commencement exercises of the Medical College of Ohio, February 28, 1879.

Loomis, Alfred Lebbeus (1831-1S95).

With little money and less health, Alfred Loomis began to practise in New York when only twenty-three. Tuber- culosis had run rife in the family and on January 23, 1895, he himself died of it. His parents were Daniel and Eliza Beach Loomis and Alfred was born at Benning- ton, Vermont, on October 16, 1831, and had barely enough money to carry him through Union College where he took his M. A. in 1856, and his M. D. from the College of Physicians and Surgeons of New York in 1852. It was not long before he gave special attention to chest disease, the art of auscultation and percussion, then developing rapidly, having great