American Medical Biographies/Greene, William Warren
Greene, William Warren (1831–1881)
William Warren Greene, for nobody thought of speaking of him in any other way, was a genius in medicine and surgery. He was born in South Waterford, Maine, March 1, 1831, his father, Jacob Holt Greene, an intellectual, independent, inventive and, above all, a very just man. He was fierce in his anti-slavery defiance at a time when it needed a brave man to express any such opinions at all. From his father young Greene must have inherited most of the qualities which he exhibited during his medical career. His mother, Sarah Walker Frye, was an excellent housewife and a genial woman. Young William had the ordinary school education of those days, but, added to this, the mental guidance of his relative, the Rev. William Warren. At sixteen he began to teach school then took up medicine with Dr. Seth Chellis Hunkins, and later attended lectures at the Berkshire Medical Institution and at Ann Arbor, Michigan, where he obtained his M. D. in 1855. A short time after he was offered a demonstratorship of anatomy at Ann Arbor, which he regretfully declined, for he was then doing well in his practice of medicine in Gray, Maine. For a while during the Civil War he was a surgeon in the army.
His former teachers at the Berkshire Medical Institution had kpet track of this promising young man, and a vacancy occurring in the chair of theory and practice of medicine, he was offered it and accepted, beginning his lectures in November, 1862.
This position he held until 1868, also that of professor of surgery in the Medical School of Maine, giving his first series of clinical lectures on that important branch of medicine in 1866. From that time until 1880 he lectured constantly.
Simultaneously he was professor of surgery in the University of Michigan, but resigned after one term. It should have been said that when he accepted the professorship at Pittsfield he settled there to practise, but abandoned that town for Portland, Maine, in 1868, remaining there thirteen years.
In 1872 he was professor of surgery in the Long Island College Hospital Medical School, in all the positions occupied winning ample renown as a clear, forcible lecturer, and a clinical teacher of extraordinary proficiency. In 1880 he was president of the Maine Medical Association and in 1873 he gave a most attractive oration on the "Scientific Spirit." In 1867 he printed four surgical papers in the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, and one on a Cesarean operation in 1868. In 1867 he reported in the Medical Record the successful removal of a large bronchocele.
He operated with grace, was rapid, yet safe, his bearing equal to his dexterity, and at the age of thirty-four he removed successfully a large bronchocele declared by the most noted surgeons to be unoperable, and was equally successful in goitre operations. Greene drained his ovariotomy cases by bringing ligatures through an opening in the cul-de-sac into the vagina.
His remarkable case of resuscitation of a woman declared to be dead and already coffined, by the ingenious use of the hypodermic injection of phosphoric acid, so that the patient survived him for thirty years, will long remain apparently miraculous in the annals of medicine in Maine.
Dr. Greene was twice married; in 1855 to Lizzie Carleton, of Waterville, and at her death in 1861 to Elizabeth Lawrence, of Pownal, who died in 1876. Two children survived him; one, who married Dr. Addison Thayer, of Portland, the other, Dr. Charles Lyman Greene, of St. Paul, Minnesota, who inherited much of his father's talent.
In July, 1881, William Warren Greene went to England to attend the International Medical Congress, and while returning home died from uremic convulsions and was buried at sea, September 10, 1881.