cized socially by many of the aristocratic members of Boston society. Such opposition only seemed to fire him to even stronger endeavors, and at the risk of loss of practice, and in spite of vehement denunciations of his course by some of the press in Boston, he resolutely held to his convictions undaunted.
His numerous journals, extracts from which were published by his son in 1902 in the "Life and Correspondence of Henry Ingersoll Bow-ditch," give vivid proof of Dr. Bowditch's active part in what he used to call the "Thirty Years' War of Antislavery." They form deeply interesting records of the history of that great movement in the United States.
In 1838 Dr. Bowditch was married to Miss Olivia Yardley of London, England, whom he had first met in Paris six years before, and to whom he had become deeply attached: a perfect union which lasted up to her death, fifty-two years later. They had four children.
Notwithstanding the calls upon his time for anti-slavery work, he was always deeply interested in his researches in medicine. His work on the ova of the lymnea (common snails) was an illustration of his great attention to detail in any scientific work. Under the microscope, he, for months, daily watched the development of the ova, and with the help of his wife succeeded in illustrating by exquisite drawings the growth of the snail from its earliest stages. This work is a classic which has been often referred to by eminent men in recent times.
Early in practice he was convinced of the lack of proper treatment for pleuritic effusions, and he watched with deepest regret the death of many a patient from the lack of what he then believed to be the proper surgical procedure in cases of large effusions which gave rise to great dispnea and often death from suffocation. Opening of the chest wall by surgical incision had been occasionally practised at rare intervals in former years, but only in cases of apparent chronic pleurisy. Shrinking from any form of surgery, for which he felt he had no talent, he nevertheless urged surgeons to relieve patients by removal of fluid in acute pleuritic effusions; but in this idea he was strenuously opposed by men of highest reputation, even surgeons. His revered master, Dr. Jackson, told him it was too dangerous, and that absorption by nature's method was the only proper way of removing fluid. One surgeon went so far as to say he "would as soon shoot a bullet into the chest wall" as to follow Dr. Bowditch's suggestion. Convinced of the correctness of his own view, however, Dr. Bowditch persisted, and finally was rewarded by seeing an instrument devised by Dr. Morrill Wyman (q. v.), of Cambridge, Mass., who had used successfully a trocar and canula connected with a suction pump on a case in which Dr. Bowditch had been called in consultation, April 17, 1850. Dr. Bowditch's first paper "On Pleuritic Effusions, and the Necessity of Paracentesis for their Removal" was read before the Boston Society for Medical Observation, Oct. 20, 1851, and published in the American Journal of the Medical Sciences, April, 1852. He believed that at last the proper instrument had been found, and from that time proceded to use the method in suitable cases successfully and in spite of great opposition at first. During the following ten years, Dr. Bowditch operated in several hundred cases without a single death and with infinite relief to the patients as a rule. He had advised a slight modification of Dr. Wyman's suction pump, which he always used. Several years after Dr. Bowditch had published the records of many cases in which he had thus aspirated the pleural cavity, (Amer. Jour. Med. Sci., Jan. 1863), Dieulafoy in Paris proclaimed to the world his excellent aspirating instrument, which differed in detail, not in principle, from Dr. Wyman's, but he never made the least allusion to the work done several years before by Dr. Bowditch; an omission which Sir William T. Gairdner of Edinburgh, the eminent clinician and professor of medicine, sharply criticized in a paper published in later years in the Edinburgh Medical Journal. Dr. Bowditch in all of his papers spoke of his debt to Dr. Wyman, who invented the original instrument, but the long and exhaustive study of cases and the successful result of introducing to the medical world the now well-known operation of thoracentesis was due to Dr. Bowditch's persistent effort to compel the profession to adopt this method of treatment.
At the same period, Dr. Bowditch was making careful investigations also as to the probable causative factors of phthisis pulmonalis ("consumption"), now usually termed pulmonary tuberculosis. For eight years he pursued his investigations by letters written to physicians throughout the state asking for data in regard to the prevalence of consumption in their localities, and the situation of homes in which the disease was most common. The result of these investigations seemed to prove the fact that residence upon a damp soil is a potent factor in the propagation of the disease. The discovery twenty years later of the
