POST
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POST
four months before his death did a
difficult ovariotomy in forty-five minutes.
In 1S31 lie married Harriet, daughter of Cyrenius Beers, of New York, and had eleven children, one of whom was Dr. George E. Post, a medical missionary, at Beirut, Syria.
He held among other appointments the professorship of surgery in the medi- cal department of the University of New York; president of the medical faculty there; member of the Berliner Kciniglich Mediziniscli-chirurgishe Gesellshaft.
His writings were chiefly to medical journals and included, among others, "A Case of Blcpharoplasty;" "Club Foot;" "Cicatricial Contractions;" "Contrac- tions of Palmar Fascia." D. W.
Trans. Med. Soc, State of N. Y., 1887. Med. Rec. N. Y. 1886, xxix. (J. C. Peters ) Med. and Surg. Reporter, Phila. 186.5, xii (S. W. Francis.)
Post, George Edward (1838-1909).
One of America's most noted medical missionaries, and equally known as a scientist and author, George Edward Post was born in New York citj^, Decem- ber 17, 1838, the son of Dr. Alfred and Harriet Beers Post. He graduated from the old New York Free Academy, now the College of the City of New York, in 1854, taking his master's degree three years later. He then entered the medical department of the University of New York, from which he graduated in 1860. One year afterwards he entered the Union Theological Seminary.
Dr. Post was elected to the professor- ship of surgery in the Syrian Protestant Hospital at Beirut, which is maintained by the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions, and this he held until his death. He was also surgeon to the Johanniret Hospital, in Beirut.
The Protestant Hospital was then a small struggling institute with few students. Dr. Post lived to see it with an enrollment of eight hundred repre- senting some twelve or fourteen nationali- ties, and Post was equally clever in deal- ing with their physical, intellectual or
moral needs. Not only that, he was a
great linguist; could hold Arab scholars
fascinated by his graceful speech or draw
around him ignorant muleteers and
caravan followers by his simple collo(juial
talk.
He wrote on many subjects, in sev- eral languages. He was author, in Arabic, of the "Flora of Syria, Palestine and Egypt;" "Text-book of Botany;" " Text-book of Mammalia ; " " Text-book of Birds;" Translations of Butler's Phys- iology;" "Concordance to the Bible;" "Text-book of Surgery;" "Text-book of Materia Medica;" and "Dictionary of the Bible." Two of these were published in English.
He also wrote, in French and Latin, " Plantae Postiana;, ' ' which was pub- lished in Geneva. Dr. Post contributed largely to Smith's, Hastings's, Jacobus', and Barnes' Dictionaries of the Bible.
He was a man of vigorous frame, alert in every action, and endowed with an unusual versatility of gifts, both mental and spiritual, and his place in clinic or chapel was rarely empty. Late in the evening he would often be working in the college herbarium he had presented and which contains some of the rarest oriental plants. He studied the plant and animal life about him to such advantage as to gain membership in European societies and give the schools text-books in Arabic upon the " Botany, Mammals and Birds of Persia," besides treatises on "Surgery and Materia Medica."
For his work in the missionary and medical fields, he received the decoration of Othnanieyh of Turkey, of the Ducal House of Saxony, and of the Red Eagle and Knights of Jerusalem of Germany. He was also member of the Linnaean Society of London, the Torrey Botanical Club of New York, the Botanical Society of Edinburgh, and the Academy of Medicine, New York.
He married Sarah Reed, of George- town, District of Columbia, and three children survived him. Of his two sons, Bertram Van Dyck became a professor of biology in Robert College at Constan-
