and original, liis language full of vigor, grace and pathos. He wielded the pen of a master and remarkable are the word-pictures he dashed off in the moments of his inspiration. His most famous poem was the Confederate war song—"Stonewall Jackson's Way"—composed within sound of the guns on the day of the Battle of Sharpsburg, September 17, 1862, and familiar to all Confederate soldiers. Some of these poems were published in 1901, under the title "For Charlie's Sake and Other Lyrics and Ballads." His poem "King's Mountain," a ballad of the Revolution, was published in the "Yale Alumni Weekly." His mind was clear and active up to his last illness and only about a year before his death he wrote what he considered his best poetic effort, "Ned Braddock."
Dr. Palmer died at Baltimore, from pneumonia, in his eighty-first year, on February 26, 1906. He married Miss Henrietta Lee, also an authoress, of Baltimore, in 1855, who survived him with one son.
E. F. C.
Sketches and portrait of Dr. Palmer appeared in the "Baltimore Sun" of February 27, 1906; in "Old Maryland," vol. ii. No. 3, March, 1906, and in "The Hospital Bulletin" of the University of Maryland, vol. ii. No. 1, same date.
Pancoast, Joseph (1805-1882).
Joseph Pancoast, son of John and Anne (Abbott) Pancoast, was born in Burlington, New Jersey, on the twenty-third of November, 1805, the descendant of an Englishman who came to this country with William Penn. Joseph graduated at the medical department of the University of Pennsylvania in 1828, and began to practise in Philadelphia, making surgery his specialty; in 1831 beginning to teach classes in practical anatomy and surgery. He was appointed physician to the Philadelphia Hospital, Blockley, and head physician to the children's hospital connected with it. In 1838 he was elected professor of surgery in the Jefferson Medical College, and in 1847, professor of anatomy in the same institution. He held the latter chair until 1874, when he resigned and was succeeded by his son, William H. Pancoast. In addition, he was one of the surgeons of the Pennsylvania Hospital from March 27, 1854, until February 29, 1864. Many operations new to surgery were devised by him. Among them was one for soft and mixed cataracts. In this, a very fine needle, turned near the point into a sort of a hook, is passed through the front part of the vitreous humor, between the margin of the dilated iris and the lens, without touching the ciliary body. The advantage of this needle is that the soft part of the lens can be deeply cut and hardened nucleus withdrawn, by a sort of horizontal displacement, along the line of entrance of the needle, the piece being left in the outer border of the vitreous humor. In 1841 he devised the plow and groove or plastic suture, in which four raw surfaces, the beveled edges of the flaps, and the margins of the groove cut by the side of the nose to receive the flaps come together. He used this suture in all his rhinoplastic operations, and union almost invariably followed. He likewise devised an operation for empyema, by raising a semicircular flap of the integuments over the ribs, and puncturing the pleura near the base of the flap; putting a short catheter down to the inner end of the puncture, secured with a strong string, and forming thus a fistulous opening, to which the movable flap served as a valve when the catheter was removed. He demonstrated that often bad cases of strabismus are due to the fact that the oblique muscle is girdled by rigid connective tissue, and that the tendons must be drawn out with a hook and cut. For the occlusion of the nasal duct, in ordinary cases of epiphora, he introduced, by a puncture of the lacrymal sac, a hollow ivory tube from which the earthy matter had been removed and left it to slowly dissolve. He several times restored a voice that was unintelligible by cutting the posterior muscles of the velum palati Vol. 11-16
