American Medical Biographies/Penrose, Richard Alexander Fullerton
Penrose, Richard Alexander Fullerton (1827–1908)
This Philadelphia obstetrician was the son of Charles Bingham and Valeria Fullerton Biddle Penrose, and was born March 24, 1827. He graduated from Dickinson College in 1846 and took his M. D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1849. For three years before he began to practise in Philadelphia he was resident physician at the Pennsylvania Hospital. In 1854, partly through his efforts, the wards of the Philadelphia Hospital were opened to medical instruction and he was soon after made consulting surgeon there. He was one of the founders of the Children's Hospital and of the Gynecean Hospital, and was elected professor of obstetrics and diseases of women and children in 1863 in the University of Pennsylvania. He resigned in 1889 with the title of emeritus professor. Dickinson College gave him her LL. D. in 1875.
He retired from practice entirely in 1889 and died in 1908.
Penrose wrote very little. His greatest claim to distinction was his brilliant career as a didactic teacher. Before the days of the obstetric clinic and its inspiration to the teacher, Penrose, with his manikin, Mrs. O'Flaherty, of blessed memory to the classes of a quarter of a century ago, actually gave clinical instruction of the highest order, and enacted a drama of labor and its complications with the accomplishments of the trained actor and skilled orator. His dramatic conversations with his padded manikin, his wit, humor, and profound knowledge of human nature, especially as found in the lying-in chamber, his climaxes in oratory that sent a thrill and carried a pointed lesson in practical obstetrics to his student classes—who among those classes ever could forget them!