only available antiseptic in those days. His skill as an obstetrician was well known in the country round. One day I hurried with him to a case which demanded Cesarean section for the patient, a deformed, rachitic negro dwarf; he devised an operating table out of some chairs and boards, the cooking stove furnished us boiling water, and a piece of fishing line, sterilized, served for ligatures when he found a complication in the shape of subperitoneal fibroid tumors which obliged him to remove the uterus en masse. The mother did not long survive but the child grew up.
Interesting writings were: "Forty Years in the Medical Profession" also "Consumption in Delaware" and "Snakes in Delaware."
Black was a member of the College of Physicians, Philadelphia, and the State Medical Society. In 1872 he married Jeanie Groome Black and had two children, Elizabeth Groome and Armytage Middleton. He died of uremia at New Castle on September 27, 1909.
Black, Rufus Smith (1812–1893)
Rufus Smith Black was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 1812, and died in California, 1893. He practised in Halifax for nearly half a century, but, his health failing in 1887, he removed to California where he lived the remainder of his days.
He took his regular medical course at Edinburgh University, from which he graduated M. D. in 1836. He also won the degree L. R. C. S. (Edin.). Taking a post-graduate course in Paris, under distinguished professors, he became acquainted with the teaching of Laennec, and subsequently became the first practitioner in Nova Scotia who regularly used the stethoscope as an aid to diagnosis. After leaving Paris he spent about a year in Spain, and thus to a good classical education added an intimate knowledge of French and Spanish.
Returning to Halifax, he soon secured a large practice.
Dr. Black was for many years one of the physicians of the Victoria General Hospital. He was a member of the Medical Society of Nova Scotia, five times its president, and president of the Halifax Medical College from 1875 to his retirement in 1887.
His addresses and papers on various subjects before local societies were marked by much literary skill, but they are not known to have been printed. One, "Value of Tartar Emetic in Rigid Cervix," appeared in the Edinburgh Medical Journal for 1865, and for a time he made translations from Spanish medical periodicals, which were published in the Maritime Medical News, Halifax.
He married Miss Ferguson, of Halifax, and had five daughters and one son, John F. Black, who studied medicine in New York and graduated from the College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1882.
Blackburn, Isaac Wright (1851–1911)
Isaac Wright Blackburn was born in Bedford County, Pa., May 27, 1851. His father was Abraham Moore Blackburn, and his mother's maiden name was Barbara Harris Wright. The families were of English descent originally, but emigrated to this country during the 17th century, and are, therefore, American. The families were among the early settlers of Pennsylvania, and were of Quaker stock, and many of their descendants yet continue in the faith of the Society of Friends.
I. W. Blackburn received his early education in the public schools, supplemented by private instruction. In 1872 he took up the study of painting, hoping to become a portrait painter, and with this in view, became a pupil of Prof. C. Schussele, principal of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, in his private art school. Subsequently he became a student at the academy under Schussele, Eakins, and Bailey. While pursuing his art studies at the academy he attended the lectures and demonstrations of Prof. W. W. Keen, on artistic anatomy, and becoming deeply interested in the study of anatomy, decided to study medicine. As a preparation for this study he entered the office of a preceptor, S. F. Lytle, M. D., of Philadelphia, Pa., and remained under his instruction while preparing to enter the University of Pennsylvania. This course of study and a course in the Auxiliary Department of Medicine in the University of Pennsylvania prepared him to enter the Medical School of the University in 1879. In 1882 he graduated with honors and received the Morbid Anatomy Prize offered by Prof. Tyson, for his thesis on the "Microscopic Diagnosis of Lymphoid Structures." Deciding to adopt pathology as his life work he remained two years for a post-graduate course in pathology under Dr. Henry F. Formad, demonstrator of pathology in the University of Pennsylvania.
On July 1, 1884, he was appointed special pathologist to the Government Hospital for the Insane, Washington D. C. In 1885 he was appointed to the position of lecturer in the
