American Medical Biographies/Hamilton, John B.
Hamilton, John B. (1847–1898).
John B. Hamilton, editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association, a successful surgeon and writer and a worker for reform in the United States Marine Hospital Service, the son of Rev. Benjamin Brown Hamilton, was born in Jersey County, Illinois, on December 1, 1847. He graduated from Rush Medical College in 1869, and married, in 1871, Mary L. Frost, having two children, Ralph Alexander and Blanche.
He entered the Marine Hospital Service by competitive examinations, where, rising rapidly to the rank of supervising surgeon-general, he reorganized the whole department; he introduced the physical examination of seamen and managed campaigns against yellow fever. His surgical skill won for him a position in Rush Medical College, and while in Washington he was surgeon to Providence Hospital and professor to Georgetown University, medical department, for eight years, and this university gave him her LL. D. On returning to Chicago he was made professor of the principles of surgery and clinical surgery in Rush Medical College and the same in the Chicago Polyclinic. The great feature of his surgical work was accurate diagnosis, and his clinic was of inestimable value to students. Among his best operations was that for hernia, he being one of the first to introduce modern methods into Chicago and improve on them.
His writings are chiefly scattered through medical journals, but he edited Moulin's Surgery, and the Journal of the American Medical Association was never more successful than during his four years' editorship. A fairly full list of his writings is in the Surgeon-General's Catalogue, Washington, D. C.
He died when fifty-one, of typhoid fever, after an arduous life of unselfish devotion to the public good.