he was surgeon in charge of United States Army General Hospital, "Harewood," at Washington, District of Columbia, one of the largest hospitals of the war, with a capacity of 3,000 beds.
On November 21, 1857, while in charge of the Troy Hospital he ligated the right subclavian artery for diffuse traumatic aneurysm of the axillary artery, the first successful case in America and one of the first three on record.
Brevetted lieutenant colonel and colonel of United States Volunteers, March 13, 1865, he resumed private practice in Troy in 1866. For many years he was attending surgeon at Watervliet Arsenal, West Troy, and attending physician and operating surgeon for twenty years at Marshall's Infirmary, Troy, where he made the first operation in this country and the second in the world for typhoidal perforation.
He was a member of the Rensselaer County Medical Society; Medical Society of the State of New York; New York State Medical Association; charter member and fellow, American Surgical Association, 1887.
He married, in 1847, Miss Susan Northrup of New Haven, Connecticut, and had five children.
Personally a vigorous and handsome man of genial temperament and great originality, he was an indefatigable worker and constant student of his profession, keeping himself abreast of its advances, and covering in his sixty years of practice an immense field of activity and achievement. A healer by instinct and a brilliant surgeon, he was a naturalist by taste and early training. He travelled extensively, and his mind, rich with wisdom and broadened by varied tastes and vast experience, was a store-house for all who knew him, and Lincoln Steffens, the publicist, said of him, "He will go down to history, I suppose, as a great doctor, and yet, what is really so much more to the point is that he was so great a man."
He died in Troy, New York, March 27, 1907.
Book, James Burgess (1843–1916)
James Burgess Book, physician and financier, was born in Palermo, Canada, November 7, 1843, and died in Detroit, Michigan, January 31, 1916. He was the son of Jonathan Johnson and Hannah Priscilla Smith Book, who were both of Dutch descent. Dr. Book began his education in the Milton county, Ontario, grammar school and continued through the Milton high school and Ingersoll College. In 1858, he entered the literary department of the Toronto University, but at the end of his sophomore year took up the medical course in the same institution. Before graduation, however, he went to Philadelphia, where he entered the Jefferson Medical College, and received an M. D. there in March, 1865, returning to Toronto and receiving there a medical degree from the Toronto University. Some months later he began private practice at Windsor, Ont., but soon moved across the river to Detroit and settled there. He took up a series of post-graduate studies in the centers of medical learning in Europe, and in the fall of 1865 went to England and attended a course of lectures at Guy's Hospital Medical School, London, the oldest medical college in England. Having completed this course he went to Paris and attended for a year the École de Medicin, which was followed by a three months' course in practical experience in the general hospital at Vienna. He left there to go to Trieste where the cholera plague was raging and studied this dreadful disease, caring for hundreds of victims day and night. In 1867 he returned home to Detroit and resumed his private practice which he combined with his duties as professor of surgery and clinical surgery at the old Michigan Medical College. Later, he was professor of surgery at the Detroit College of Medicine. In 1872 he was appointed surgeon to St. Luke's Hospital, where he remained four years, and then he was attending surgeon at Harper Hospital. In 1882 he became surgeon-in-chief of the Detroit, Lansing & Northern Railroad, where he continued until his retirement from the profession in 1895, when he turned his whole attention to business. He was a director of several banks and insurance companies and helped to finance some of the first and largest automobile companies in Detroit.
He was surgeon of the Independent Battalion of Detroit in 1881 and later regimental surgeon in the State National Guard.
He married Clotilde, daughter of Francis Palms, a capitalist of Detroit, and they had three children, James Burgess, Francis Palms, and Herbert Vivian Book.
It was as a skilful and daring operator that Dr. Book was especially noted. In 1882 he was the first in the west to remove successfully Meckel's ganglion. He wrote "Nerve Stretching," the result of a series of new experiments which he had conducted in what was then a new department in surgery; "The
