pointed demonstrator of anatomy in the
Willoughby Medical College, Ohio. Soon
after he removed to Toledo, where he
practised for several years and married
in 1837 Miss Sophia S. Howell of Willoughby. On the organization of the
Cleveland Medical College in 1843 he
was called to its chair of surgery, and
continued to occupy this position until
his resignation in 1858. During the
epidemic of cholera which decimated
Sandusky in 1849, on the call for medical
aid by the afflicted city, Dr. Ackley
abandoned his practice, organized a
relief corps of physicians and proceeded
at once to the seat of the epidemic.
He was president of the Ohio State Medical Society in 1852.
Though for fifteen years the most active and eminent operative surgeon of Northern Ohio, no written records of his work have been preserved. But the almost unanimous testimony is conclu- sive in establishing the fact that Dr. Ackley was a bold and skilful operator, who divided with Dr. R. D. Mussey of Cincinnati the vast majority of the major surgical practice of his day in the region west of the Alleghanies and north of the Ohio River.
He was gifted with a most remarkable self-possession in the presence of danger, which stood him in good service, whether holding a mob at bay, in the performance of a dangerous surgical operation, or finding a mistake of diagnosis after the conclusion of the operation. He was considered a splendid medical witness, and his assistance was sought in all cases where medical testimony would affect the verdict. Particularly was this so in cases of malpractice and medical juris- prudence. It was of but little use for a attorney, no matter how astute, to cross- examine him in expectation of changing or controverting his proposition
Dr Ackley was neither an extensive reader nor a profound pathologist, and his lectures, while clear and accurate, lacked system and connection. As a clinical lecturer he was at his best. He was an enthusiastic sportsman, and whatever time he could snatch from the demands of an engrossing surgical practice was devoted to amusement with his rod and gun. It was upon his farm and largely at his expense that the first experiments in the artificial propagation of fish were made by his partner, Dr. Garlick, in 1853.
As an operator Ackley was bold, skilful and determined. Two ovariotomies performed by him in 1855 and 1857 are recorded by Dr. J. W. Hamilton of Columbus in the Transactions of the Ohio State Medical Society for 1859, where we find, also, two letters from the eminent physician and surgeon, Dr. John Delamater, of Cleveland, discussing the merits and demerits of the operation. In one of these letters he says: "Usually Professor Ackley was accustomed to dissuade patients from submitting to any operative procedures in these cases, beyond that of mere tapping as a palliative in the later stages of the affection." The position of both Delamater and Ackley on the question of ovariotomy seems to have been practically the same.
Nil de mortuis nisi bonum—yet the truth of history demands further the brief and sad statement that Dr. Ackley in his later years fell into habits of intemperance, which not only obscured the honorable records of a strenuous life, but contributed in no slight degree to his premature death, April 24, 1859.[1]
H. E. H.
Adams, Horatio (1801-1861).
Horatio Adams, son of the Rev. Solomon Adams, of Middleton, Mass., was a prominent member of the Middlesex
- ↑ An excellent portrait of Dr. Ackley is preserved in the faculty room of the medical department of the Western Reserve University, and very good engravings are found in the parlors of the Cleveland Medical Library Association, and in Cleave's Biographical Cyclopedia of the State of Ohio.
Cleave's Biographical Cyclopedia. " Medical and Surgical Reminiscences of the Maumee Valley," by W. W. Jones, Toledo, Ohio, 1892 (?) Transactions of the Ohio State Medical Society, 1859.
