TONER
different points for the Hudson's Bay
Company, and after five years as surgeon
in Fort Vancouver he visited his native
land, and the following year was placed
in charge of the Hudson's Bay Company's
posts on Puget Sound. He took a promi-
nent part during the Indian war of 1855-
56 in pacifying the Indians, being an
excellent linguist.
Dr. Tolmie was known to ethnologists for his contributions to the history and linguistics of the native races of the west coast. In 1884 he published, in con- junction with Dr. G. M. Dawson, a nearly complete series of short vocabularies of the principal languages met with in British Columbia. He retained to the day of his death accurate recollections of the stirring events of the early Colonial days, and there was no one so intimate with the Indian affairs of the province.
O. M. J.
Toner, Joseph Meredith (1825-1896).
Toner, himself a faithful biographer of his medical confreres, well deserves that his own biography should be written. He was born on April 30, 1825, in Pitts- burg, Pennsylvania, and went as a lad to the Western University, and Mt. St. Mary's College, Maryland. His M. D. was from the Vermont Academy of Medicine, and his A. M. from the Jeffer- son Medical College. He practised suc- cessively at Summit and Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, Harper's Ferry, Virginia, and finally at Washington, District of Columbia, where he established himself in November, 1855. He was president of the American Medical Association; a member of the Medical Society and Medical As- sociation of the District of Columbia; an honorary member of the New York and California State Medical Societies, and of the Boston Gynecological Society. He was a founder of Providence Hospital and St. Ann's Infant Asylum, Washing- ton, to which he was visiting physician, and from 1856 was attending physician to St. Joseph's Orphan Asylum, Washing- ton. In consideration of the perishable character of much of the early medical
451 TONER
literature of this country, Dr. Toner devised a scheme for a repository of medical works that should be under the control of the medical profession of the United States and located at the National Capitol. His resolution on that subject was adopted by the American Medical Association in 1868 and resulted in the establishment of the library of that organization. The collection was placed in the Smithsonian Institution and reached the number of several thousand volumes, including pamphlets.
In 1871 Dr. Toner founded the Toner lectures by placing $3000 (which after- wards increased to nearly double that amount) in the hands of trustees charged with the duty of annually procuring two lectures containing new facts valuable to medical science; the interest on the fund, save ten per cent., which was added to the permanent fund, was paid to the authors of the essays. These lectures were included in the regular hst of publications of the Smithsonian Institution. It was the first attempt in this country to endow a course of lectures on such conditions. Dr. Toner devoted much time and research to early medical literature, collected over a thousand treatises pub- Hshed before 1800, and besides publishing numerous monographs, had in prepara- tion a " Biographical Dictionary of Deceased American Physicians," of which more than four thousand sketches were completed. He was an authority on the medical, biographical and local history of the District of Columbia and devised a system of symbols of geographical localities adopted by the United States Post Office Department. A member of numerous medical, historical and philo- sophical associations, he published more than fifty papers and monographs upon subjects of interest to the medical profession.
His more important pubUcations are: "Abortion in a Medical and Moral Aspect;" "Arrest of Development of the Cranial Bones — Epilepsy," 1861; "Maternal Instinct of Love," 1864; "Propriety and Necessity of Compelling
