Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography/Folsom, Nathaniel Smith

FOLSOM, Nathaniel Smith, clergyman, b. in Portsmouth, N. H., 12 March, 1806. He was graduated at Dartmouth in 1828 and at Andover theological seminary in 1831, and ordained on 26 Sept. of that year. After acting as a missionary in Liberty county, Ga., in 1831-'2, he was pastor of a Presbyterian church in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1832-'3, professor in Lane theological seminary in 1833, and held the chair of biblical literature in Western Reserve college in 1833-'6. He held Congregational pastorates at Francestown, N. H., in 1836-'8, and Providence, R. I., in 1838-'40, was pastor of a Unitarian church at Haverhill, Mass., in 1840-'6, and edited the “Christian Register” in Charlestown, Mass., in 1846-'8. He was professor of biblical literature in Meadville, Pa., theological seminary in 1848-'61, and in 1862 was a teacher in Concord, Mass., also acting as pastor of a church there in 1867-'8. In 1875 he removed to Boston. Dr. Folsom has contributed to current literature, and has published “Critical and Historical Interpretation of the Prophecies of Daniel” (Boston, 1842).—His son, Charles Follen, physician, b. in Haverhill, Mass., 3 April, 1842, was graduated at Harvard in 1862. He taught among the freedmen in the south from 1862 till 1865, when he returned to Massachusetts, studied medicine, and, after his graduation at Harvard medical school in 1870, began general practice in Boston. In 1873-'5 he attended lectures in Vienna, Berlin, and Munich. He was lecturer on hygiene in Harvard in 1877-'85, and lecturer and assistant professor of mental diseases from 1879 till 1882. He has been secretary of the Massachusetts board of health, and of the state board of health, lunacy, and charity, and has been a member of the national board since 1882. Dr. Folsom is visiting physician to various hospitals and asylums, and is a member of the State medical society, and of numerous medical societies. His writings have been chiefly confined to health reports and articles on hygiene and mental diseases. Several of his lectures have been reprinted, one of them, on “Mental Diseases,” for the use of students in the Harvard medical school. This was first published in Pepper's “American System of Medicine.” He has written papers on “Limited Responsibility,” “General Paralysis,” and “Insanity in England and America”; “Letters from Europe,” which appeared in the Boston “Medical and Surgical Journal,” and has published in book form “The Present Aspect of the Sewage Question as Applied to Boston” (Boston, 1877).