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Kimball, Gilman (1804-1892).
A jiyiuH'olojiist. ho was born at \ow Cliestor ui<^'^\' Hill) New llanipshirr on December 8. 1804, the son of Eben- ezer and Polly Kimball, and after a good education began to study med- icine at Dartmouth College where he took his M. D. in 1826, starting practice the next year in the town of Chicojiee, Massachusetts. Two years in a small town taught him his limitations and, aspiring to be something more than mediocre in sm-gery he spent one year under Auguste B(f>rard in Paris, and also went almost daily to the Duimj- tren clinic.
Then foUoweil sixty years of fine service to suffering humanity in Low- ell, Massachusetts, particularly when chosen surgeon to a hospital erected by mill owners for their oi)eratives In 1842 he succeeded Willard Parker as professor of surgery at Woodstock, Vermont, and held the same chair in the Berkshire Medical Institution at Pittsfield, Massachusetts. Like most surgeons he was glad to be in warfare and accompanied Gen. Butler to Annapolis and Fort Monroe first as brigade surgeon then as medical direc- tor and helped greatly in organizing the hospitals until, twice prostrated Ijy malaria, he had to resign.
As early as 1855 he operated for the removal of ovarian tumors, a pro- ceeding then still regarded as too daring by most surgeons. In New England, outside Boston, it had hard- ly been done at all, so Kimball re- quired a good deal of courage when he set out to rescue the some forty per cent, of women likely to die of the disease. Even before this, in 1853, he was a pioneer in extirpation of the uterus for fibroids. About 1870, writes his friend Dr. F. H. Davenport, he joined Dr. Ephriam Cutter in the treatment of fibroids by electrolysis. Outside of gynecology he did two amputations (one successful) at the hip-joint; a ligation of the internal iliac artery, unsuccessful, the external
iliac, the femoral and subclavian
arteries, all of which did well.
i\iml)all only gave up work when his health obliged him so to do a few jears before his death. When he died at Lowell on July 27, 1892, his cigiity-seven years had not impaired his mental vigor one little bit and his interest in things medical was as keen as ever.
He was twice married; first to Mary, daughter of Dr. Henry Dewar of Edin- l)urgh, Scotland, then to Isabella De- frier of Nantucket, Massachusetts.
His writings were chiefly on: gas- trotomy, ovariotomy and uterine ex- tirpation, in the "Boston Medical and Surgical Journal," 1855, 1874 and 1876.
Yale and Williams Colleges gave him their honorary M. D., and Dart- mouth her honorary A. M.; he was also a fellow of the College of Physicians and Surgeons of New York; member of the Massachusetts Medical Society and president of the American Gyne- cological Society. D. W.
Am. .lour. Ob.stet., N. Y., 1892, vol. xxvi. Tr. Am. Gyn. Soc, 1892, vol. xvii.
King, John (1813-1893).
John King is remembered not only in his own state of Ohio, but through- out the country as a famous analytical pharmacologist. New York City was his birthplace on January 1, 1813, and, his parents being well off, their son had time to become a good linguist, to amuse himself with engraving, music and mechanics before he graduated in medicine from Wooster Beach's Medical School, New York. After graduating he devoted many years to practical work as a botanist, phar- macologist and chemist, in 1851 becom- ing a teacher in the Cincinnati Eclectic Medical Institute and remaining sur- rounded by enthusiastic pupils there until his death at North Bend, Ohio, in 1893. His eclecticism was akin to an all-embracing Catholicism in med- icine. He was an omnivorous reader and able to keep in touch with the
