of the German Congress of Surgeons invited him to send to Berlin some specimens of bone reproduction for exhibition with similar specimens. Langenbeck greatly admired a regenerated lower jaw and said he did not believe another specimen existed. In nerve surgery Wood was equally successful, his best operation, performed four times consecutively with ultimate cure, was the removal of Meckel's ganglion with the superior maxillary division of the trigeminus for the relief of tic douloureux. He was the first in America (1840) to divide the masseter muscles and, as far as his biographer was aware, the first to devise division of the peronei muscles in chronic dislocation of the tendon and to treat acute and chronic inflammations of the knee joint by division of the ham strings and tendo Achillis. He had in his collection six fine specimens of osseous union between the femur and the tibia after resection. Report also gives him the credit of being one of the first to cure aneurysm by digital pressure, and he tied the external iliac for aneurysm eight times in succession, with only one failure.
Early in his career he planned for the creation of Bellevue Hospital out of the almshouse, and with Drs. Parker and Metcalf brought about its foundation and became with them its medical board. His interest in the institution was for a lifetime. In 1856 he helped found the Bellevue Hospital Medical College, growing out of the hospital, and was at once appointed professor of operative surgery and surgical pathology.
With Drs. Parker, Payne and Mason he had much to do with the Act which granted for anatomical teaching "the bodies of all vagrants dying unclaimed." His work also on behalf of the Bellevue Hospital Training School for Nurses did a great deal to advance the interests of the school.
Death came in the heyday of a full professional life when almost half a century had left untouched his health and skill. As an instructor he brought clinical and didactic information together in fruitful union; tradition will preserve his skill at the operating table, and his contributions to surgical science are permanent. He died in New York May 4, 1882.
He married in 1853, Emma, daughter of Mr. James Rowe, of New York, and had one son and two daughters besides a child who died in infancy.
His literary contributions, though not numerous were all of value, and included: "Strangulated Hernia," 1845; "Spontaneous Dislocation of the Head of the Femur into the Ischiatic Notch During Morbus Coxarius," 1847; "Ligature of the External Iliac Artery Followed by Secondary Hemorrhage," 1856; "Phosphorus-necrosis of the Lower Jaw," 1856; "Early History of Ligation of the Primitive Carotid," 1857.
Dr. Wood was twice president of the New York Pathological Society; member of the New York Academy of Medicine, honorary member New York and Massachusetts State Medical Societies.
Wood, Thomas (1813–1880)
Thomas Wood was born in Smithfield, Jefferson County, Ohio, August 22, 1813, the son of Nathan and Margaret Wood, and the youngest of five children.
The family for three generations were natives and inhabitants of West Chester, Pennsylvania, his great-grandparents having been born there in 1750. The family were Quakers. Dr. Wood's father was a farmer in very moderate circumstances, so that the boy's early education was an exceedingly limited one; he seems, however, to have obtained, through his own exertions, good schooling. In 1835 he began to study medicine with Dr. W. S. Bates, of Smithfield.
In June, 1838, he went to Philadelphia, preparatory to entering the University of Pennsylvania. His letters home show that in this he suffered many privations, and the answers indicate many doubts as to the wisdom of the undertaking, but the lad went steadily on his way. In April, 1839, he received his diploma, and immediately an appointment in the Friends' Asylum for the Insane, near Philadelphia. There he remained three years. In 1842, he returned to Smithfield, and began practice, but in 1844 went to Europe and on his return in 1845, went to Cincinnati, and began a career which certainly justified all his former privations and longings. The Ohio College of Dental Surgery was chartered January 21, 1845, but did not begin operations until November, 1846. Dr. Wood was professor of anatomy and physiology there, a position he held for a number of years.
