American Medical Biographies/Anderson, Alexander
Anderson, Alexander (1775–1870)
In the death of Anderson, who died on the seventeenth of January, 1870, in Jersey City, the engraver's craft and the world of book-readers lost a long-familiar friend.
He was the pioneer engraver on wood in America, the virtual inventor of the art on this side of the Atlantic. His name was familiar to booksellers and readers in America from the beginning of the present century; and the mysterious little monogram "A.A." in the corners of woodcuts in educational books attracted the attention of millions of children in schools and at firesides when experiencing the delight of his pictures.
Dr. Anderson was of Scotch descent, his father being a native of Scotland. He was born near Beekman's Slip, New York City, on the twenty-first of April, 1775, two days after the first bloodshed in the war for independence had occurred at Lexington and Concord. His father differed in politics from most of his countrymen in America at that time, who were generally distinguished for their loyalty to the king; and at the time of Alexander's birth he was the publisher of a republican newspaper in the city of New York called The Constitutional Gazette. He continued to publish it in opposition to the ministerial papers of Rivington and Gaine until the autumn of 1776, when the British took possession of New York City. When the "rebel printer" was compelled to fly, with his books and printing materials, nearly all of which were lost before he reached a place of absolute safety in Connecticut.
At the age of twelve years young Anderson began to use the graver for his own amusement. He was a timid lad, shrank from asking questions, and gained information by silent and modest observation. Peeping into the shop windows of silversmiths he saw the shape and the method of manipulating the graver in the lettering of spoons; and rolled-out copper cents gave him his plates for first efforts. The wonders of general science early engaged his attention, especially that branch which pertains to the economy of man's physical life. Some of his earlier efforts in the engraver's art were in making copies of anatomical figures from medical books. His father perceived this proclivity with pleasure, and deprecating the lad's manifest love of art, he allowed him to make preparations for the profession of a physician. In May, 1796, at the age of twenty-one years, he received the degree of Doctor of Medicine from the faculty of Columbia College. The subject of his address on that occasion was "Chronic Mania and the theories which he then advanced concerning its cause and cure have now been long-established facts in medical science.
Soon after young Anderson began his professional studies, when about seventeen years, his proficiency in art had become so great notwithstanding the many difficulties that lay in his way, that he was employed by William Durell, a bookseller, to copy the illustrations of a popular little English work entitled "The Looking-Glass for the Mind." The engravings that adorned it were made on wood by Bewick, the father of modern wood-engraving. Up to this time Anderson's engravings had been made on type metal and he had no idea that wood was used for the purpose. When he had completed about half the illustrations he was informed that Bewick's pictures were engraved on boxwood. He immediately procured some pieces of that wood from a rule-maker's shop, invented proper tools, experimented, and, to his great joy he found the material much more agreeable to work upon and more easily managed than type-metal.
In the first year of his practice of medicine Dr. Anderson drew and engraved on wood, in a most admirable manner, even when compared with the art at the present day, a full-length human skeleton, from Albinus's "Anatomy," which he enlarged to the length of three feet. This, it is believed, is the largest fine and carefully elaborated engraving on wood ever attempted, and has never been excelled in accuracy of drawing and characteristic execution.
When Dr. Anderson was at the age of twenty-three years his family all died of the yellow fever. He was attacked while in attendance upon the physician with whom he had studied, himself prostrated by it. Both recovered; and Anderson made a voyage to the West Indies to visit a paternal uncle, Alexander Anderson, who was "the king's botanist" at St. Vincent. On his return he resolved to abandon the medical profession as a business and devote himself to engraving, for which he had conceived an irrepressible passion.
Anderson established himself as an engraver and up to the year 1820 he used both wood and metal, as occasion required. He illustrated the earliest editions of "Webster's Spelling-book," which for about seventy years was a leading elementary book in the schools of the United States. Its sale was enormous, and at one time amounted to about a million copies a year. In 1857 a new and more fully illustrated edition of that work was published, the engravings executed by Anderson from drawings by Morgan, one of his pupils, who was about eight years his junior.
During his long and busy life Dr. Anderson engraved many thousands of subjects. In the year 1799 he engraved several large copperplates for Josephus' "History of the Jews," and in 1808 he executed on wood sixty or seventy illustrations for an American edition of Bell's "Anatomy," copied from the originals, etched by Bell himself. His last engraving on copper was made about the year 1812 to illustrate a quarto Bible. The subject was "The Last Supper," from an English design.
In the spring of 1859, when in the eighty-fifth year of his age, Dr. Anderson changed his place of residence, and removed from where he had lived about thirty years. At that time he issued a new business card, drawn and engraved by himself, with the appropriate motto—Flexus Non Fractus—"Bent, but not broken."
At the time of his death, Dr. Anderson was in the ninety-fifth year of his age. In person he was a little below the medium height, rather thick-set, and presented a countenance always beaming with benevolence and kindly feeling. He was extremely regular and temperate in his habits. "I would not sit up after 10 o'clock," he used to say, "to see an angel." He was genial in thought and conversation, and uncommonly modest and retiring. It was not without much persuasion that he consented to sit for the daguerreotype from which his portrait was copied, and which he himself engraved when he was past the eightieth year of his age.