CORNETT
CORSS
settled at Morrisville, Virginia in 1845
and began at once to build up a large
country practice.
He was a member of the Medical Soci- ety of Virginia, and was in 1882 elected president of the State Society, and made an honorary member the year following.
Dr. Cooper married in June, 1845, Miss Mattie F. Henry, daughter of Fountain Henry, Esq., of Culpeper County.
Catarrh of the stomach with liver complications caused his death on Oc- tober 30, 1897, at his home in Morris- ville, Virginia.
His contributions to medical literature were not numerous, but were of con- siderable value. The following may be read with interest:
"Presidential Address." ("Transac- tions of Medical Society of Virginia," 1883.)
" Protracted Labor." (" Virginia Med- ical Monthly," vol. xi.)
" Carious Destruction of Two Cervical and Dorsal Vertebrae; Death; Post- mortem." ("Transactions of Medical Society of Virginia," 1888.)
R. M. S.
" Transactions of Medical Society of Virginia," 1S9S.
Cornett, William T. S. (1805-1897).
William T. S. Cornett, who did good work as a pioneer physician with only a few books and common sense, was born at Carrolton, Kentucky on July 11, 1S05. His early life presented the too common combination of a widowed mother with a bright son and little money. For three years he compounded drugs with a general practitioner then studied medi- cine at Transylvania University, and when nineteen, funds being exhausted, offered his medical services to the sick in Dearborn, Indiana. Where was his license and diploma? asked the local censors. He obtained them in examina- tion before them. Then this lad of twenty was, for three years, the only doctor in Versailles, Ripley County, Indiana, with the books of Cullen and Thomas as guides
and plenty of cholera, dysentery and fever
to give him experience. He was of
opinion that remittent and intermittent
fevers, so common in that thickly tim-
bered and swampy district, were as
specifically different as small-pox and
measles. He noted, before the days of
quinine, chronic intermittents were com-
mon, lasting six months or even a ye:ir,
but remittent fever killed the patient
or subsided within a given time, and if
there was unity of cause there should be
a unity of effect. Like Dewees the
obstetrican, he also held to bleeding as
a relief in blood pressure on the brain in
puerperal convulsions. His contributions
to medical literature were chiefly in the
"Transactions of the Indiana State Med-
ical Society" and in the southern and
western journals. When in the state
senate he obtained a grant to start a
lunatic asylum, and a farm was purchased
and converted into one. (" Senate
Journal," 1843.)
He held an M. D. from the University of Louisville and also from the Central medical College of Indiana.
After forty years of hard work in Versailles he removed to Madison, always retaining his interest in medical progress. His energy found vent in geological studies and collecting specimens. He had two children by his wife Mary Mason, a native of Bristol, England.
W. R. D.
Corss, Frederic (1842-190S).
Frederic Corss, born in Athens, Penn- sylvania, January 16, 1S42, was a son of the Rev. Charles L. Corss, Presbyterian minister, and of Ann Hoyt Corss. He was descended from James Corss of Greenfield, Massachusetts, who died in 1696.
He graduated A. B. from Lafayette College in 1862 and took his A. M. in 1865 and his M. D. from Pennsylvania University in 1866. In the same year he settled in Kingston, Pennsylvania, where he continued up to the time of his last illness. Here, in 1S72, he married Martha S. Hoyt, who survived him.