Page:A cyclopedia of American medical biography vol. 2.djvu/602

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WYMAN
538
WYMAN


hours or days, as the case might be, that would illustrate something or other which an anatomist or a physiologist would find it a profit and pleasure to study. Under a balanced bell-glass he kept a costly and complicated microscope, but he preferred working with an honest, old-fashioned, steady-going instrument of the respectable, upright Oberhaueser pattern. His outfit for happy employment was as simple as John the Baptist's for prophecy."

To Holmes we are likewise indebted for the following personal description of Wyman:

"Jeffries Wyman looked his character so well that he might have been known for what he was in a crowd of men of letters and science. Of moderate stature, of slight frame, evidently attenuated by long invalidism, with a well-shaped head, a forehead high rather than broad, his face thin, his features bold, his expression mild, tranquil, intelligent, firm as of one self-poised, not self-asserting, his scholarly look emphasized by the gold-bowed spectacles his near-sightedness forced him commonly to wear; the picture of himself he has left indelibly impressed on the memory of his friends and pupils is one which it will always be a happiness to recall."

He died at Cambridge, Massachusetts, on September 4, 1874, of pulmonary tuberculosis.

C. R. B.

A nearly complete bibliography of Wyman's works is given in the Biographical Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. ii, 1886, pp. 77-126. It is reprinted in "Animal Mechanics," 1902.

Jeffries Wyman. Address of Prof. Asa Gray at a memorial meeting of the Boston Society of Natural History, held October 7, 1874. Prof. Jeffries Wyman. A memorial outline, by Oliver Wendell Holmes. "Atlantic Monthly," vol. xxxiv, July-December, 1874. Jeffries Wyman. By Burt G. Wilder. Old and New, November, 1874.

Jeffries Wyman, by Burt G. Wilder. "Popular Science Monthly," January, 1875 (with portrait).

Prof. Wilder, one of the most devoted and most distinguished of Wyman's pupils, also has an account of Wyman in Holt's "American Naturalists."


The Scientific Life, by S. Weir Mitchell, "Lippincott's -Magazine," March, 1875. Jeffries Wyman. By Frederick W. Putnam. Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. N. S. vol. x. Contains a bibliography.

History of the Lowell Institute. By Miss Harriette Knight Smith, 1898. (port.).


Wyman, Morrill (1812-1903).

Morrill Wyman, son of Ruf us Wyman, a physician of Chelmsford, Massachusetts, was born in that town July 25, 1812.

He graduated from Harvard College in the same class as his brother Jeffries in 1833, and received the M. D. from the Harvard Medical School in 1837. He studied with Dr. William J. Walker, of Charlestown, before graduating from the school and after graduation served as house officer at the Massachusetts General Hospital. He began and continued practice in Cambridge in 1838 until a few years before his death, which occurred January 31, 1903, at the ripe age of ninety-one.

For a few years during his early life he was adjunct Hersey professor of the theory and practice of physic in the Harvard Medical School. From 1875 to 1889 he was an overseer of the University and in 1885 was given the LL.D. of Harvard. He was consulting physician to the Massachusetts General Hospital, to the Cambridge Hospital, in the establishment of which he was especially prominent, and to the Adams' Nervine Asylum in Jamaica Plain, a part of Boston.

In 1839 he married Elizabeth Aspinwall, daughter of Capt. Robert S. Pulsifer, a Boston shipmaster. He was survived by a son and daughter.

In 1846 he published a volume of 400 pages on ventilation which was an authority for many years.

On February 23, 1850, he removed a large quantity of fluid from the chest of a patient suffering from pleural effusion, making use of an exploring needle and a stomach pump. He repeated the operation a few days later with success, and on April 17, of the same year, operated on a patient of Dr. Henry Ingersoll Bowditch.