American Medical Biographies/Hartley, Frank
Hartley, Frank (1856–1913).
Frank Hartley, surgeon of New York, was born June 10, 1856, in Washington, D. C. His father, John Fairfield Hartley, was assistant secretary of the treasury of the United States; both father and mother came from Maine. Frank attended the public schools of Washington and entered the Emerson Institute, where he was prepared for Princeton University. There he received an A. B. in 1877, and at the College of Physicians and Surgeons, Columbia University, was made an M. D. in 1880. After serving as interne at Bellevue Hospital he took a post-graduate course at Vienna, and Leipsic 1882–1884. He was appointed instructor in surgery in Columbia in 1888, and professor of clinical surgery in 1900, being a successful quiz master in his early career. Beginning his hospital service as assistant surgeon at Roosevelt Hospital in 1885, he served as surgeon at Bellevue from 1888 to 1892, and after that as surgeon to the New York Hospital. At the time of his death from nephritis, June 19, 1913, he was professor of clinical surgery in his alma mater, attending surgeon to the New York Babies' Hospital, and consulting surgeon to the French, Italian, General Memorial, St. Joseph's at Paterson, New York and White Plains hospitals, besides being a member of the American Urological and American Surgical associations and the customary national, state and local medical societies.
In 1892 he published "Intracranial Neurectomy of the Second and Third Divisions of the Fifth Nerve; a New Method" (New York Medical Journal, 1892, vol. lv. 317–319). This was followed by "Intracranial Neurectomy of the Fifth Nerve" (Annals of Surgery, Philadelphia, 1893, vol. xvii, 511–526, 3 pl.) Although he made numerous other contributions to medical literature, notably to the columns of the Annals of Surgery, in which he published at least fifteen papers, he was known chiefly as the deviser of the method of bisecting the ganglion of the trigeminal nerve within the skull for the relief of facial neuralgia.
Princeton conferred on him an LL. D. in 1909.