Among his appointments he was demonstrator of anatomy in the Medical College of Ohio, 1853; professor of anatomy; professor of surgical anatomy; editor and owner of the Western Lancet, in connection with Dr. L. M. Lawson, from 1853 to 1857; on the staff of the Commercial (now Cincinnati) Hospital from August 15, 1861, to March 15, 1867; and again in 1870 and 1871, a member of the Academy of Medicine of Cincinnati.
Dr. Wood was a versatile genius; in 1839, before he graduated in medicine, he invented an instrument designed to facilitate the calculation of areas, which received the highest praise from a committee appointed by the Franklin Institute of Philadelphia. It was called the "Arealite."
At the same time he presented to the same body a fountain pen, which was likewise highly commended.
Subsequently he invented an instrument for determining the length of lines, and to find the horizontal of a line when it ascends or descends a hill. This was called "The Lineal Mensurator." A patent was granted July 22, 1839.
In an old scrap-book of the doctor's is a drawing of a balloon which could be driven in any direction.
For many years the doctor kept a scrapbook, in which are found a great number of poems, some of considerable merit, none of which were ever published.
Dr. Wood married, March 14, 1843, Emily A. Miller, at Mount Pleasant, Jefferson County, Ohio, and had two children, Edwin Miller, born January 30, 1844, who became a doctor. A second son, Samuel S., died in infancy. In 1855 he again married, this time Elizabeth J. Reiff, of Philadelphia, and had six children. Charles Reiff Wood, born May 9, 1857, became a doctor, but died in 1891. Mrs. Wood died July 27, 1871, and Dr. Wood, undaunted, made a third venture with Carrie C. Fels, of Cincinnati, on July 27, 1876, but had no children.
Dr. Wood died November 21, 1880, in Cincinnati, from blood-poisoning acquired while treating some of the injured in a railroad collision, October 20, 1880.
Wood, Thomas Fanning (1841–1892)
Thomas Fanning Wood, medical editor, botanist and organizer of a state board of health, was born in Wilmington, North Carolina, February 23, 1841. His parents, Robert and Mary A. Wood, were from Nantucket, Massachusetts. He received a high school education in Wilmington and then went to work in a drugstore, where he mastered all that was then known of drugs, and at different times he became the private pupil of the chief physicians of the town. At the beginning of the Civil War he volunteered and was a private in the 18th North Carolina Infantry; he then served as hospital steward under Otis F. Mason (q.v.) in Richmond, Virginia. Here he attended a course of lectures at the Medical College of Virginia, and upon examination was appointed assistant surgeon to the 3rd North Carolina Infantry, remaining until the end of the war, when he returned home to practise. The Federal Army had left in Wilmington an epidemic of smallpox and Dr. Wood organized a hospital for the care of the sick and treated over thirteen hundred cases. He inoculated himself many times with virus from the pustules of his patients and his enthusiasm for vaccination was so great that he named his son Edward Jenner.
Dr. Wood received an honorary M. D. from the University of Maryland in 1868; was secretary of the Medical Society of North Carolina; was elected member of the Board of Medical Examiners of North Carolina, and the same year (1878) with M. J. DeRosset (q.v.), began the North Carolina Medical Journal, of which he was editor-in-chief until his death. He was interested in organized sanitary work and in 1885 secured a statute from the Legislature creating a State Board of Health in North Carolina, planned according to his ideas. As secretary of the Board he issued monthly bulletins with valuable statistics; he was a founder of the American Public Health Association and was its first vice-president.
Dr. Wood was an enthusiastic student of botany and was an authority on the plants of his State. This knowledge made him an important member of the committee for the revision of the Pharmacopoeia (1890–1900). With Gerald McCarthy he prepared a catalogue of the flora of that section of the South and it was published as a part of the transactions of the Elisha Mitchell Scientific Society of the University of North Carolina under the title of "Wilmington Flora," 1887.
Dr. Wood had an interest in the welfare of his native town and he was president of
