DORSEY 320 DORSEY chairman of the Section of Obstetrics and Dis- eases of Women in 1908. At one time he was president of the St. Louis Medical Society, Missouri State Medical Association, St. Louis Obstetrical and Gynecological Society and the American Association of Obstetricians and Gy- necologists. He counted these among the so- cieties of which he was a member: St. Louis City Hospital Alumni, St. Louis Surgical So- ciety, St. Louis Medical History Club, Sur- geons' Club of St. Louis, St. Louis Academy of Science, American Association of Railway Surgeons, Western Surgical Society, South- ern Surgical and Gynecological Society, Medi- cal Association of the Southwest. His hospital service included the positions of attending gynecologist to the Missouri Bap- tist Sanitarium and the Evangelical Deaconess Home and Hospital, and he was consulting gynecologist to St. Mary's Infirmary, the Re- bekah Hospital, and the Alta Vista Hospital, at DeSoto, Missouri. He had been for many years professor of gynecology and pelvic surgery in the St. Louis University School of Medicine. Dr. Dorsett was a frequent contributor to medical literature and in his extemporaneous discussions of professional subjects he im- pressed the listener with his capacity for work and with the wide range of his knowledge. He possessed a charming personality, combin- ing modern push with old-fashioned courtesy, making him a delightfully conspicuous figure at all gatherings which he graced with his presence. As a teacher he possessed a rare ability of awakening interest in his students, and he was able to hold their respect and af-, fection. He died of choronic nephritis, July 27, 1915, after a year of suffering with angina. Amer. Jour. Obst., 1916, vol. Ixxiii, 152-154. Portrait. Dorsey, Frederick (1774-1858). Frederick Dorsey is included in this book as a conspicuous example of a remarkable, fast- disappearing type, namely, the old-fashioned country practitioner. Born in Anne Arundel County in 1774, he moved early to Washington County, Md., where he lived until his death, October, 1858, at the age of eighty-four. He had no regular medical degree, but attended one or two courses of lectures. In 1804 he received a diploma of honorary membership in the Philadelphia Medical Societj', and in 1824 an honorary degree of M. D. was conferred by the University of Maryland. He was active to the last, and at the time of his death was associated in practice with his son and a grand- son, and his family included great-grandchil- dren. His kingdom was a small one, but ideal, in that he ruled absolutely in the hearts of the people, and was the uncrowned sovereign of a whole countyside and beyond. He lived through the American Revolution and through France's bloody history ; he knew George Washington, idolized Jefferson, and Rush was his friend and preceptor; and he himself was the idol of all the early notable families of the County. He lived to see the foot-path become a county road, and this a turnpike and then a railway, and he saw the tide of emi- gration sweep out of his native sttate beyond the Alleghanies, over the Mississippi, across the hostile plains and over the Rockies to the shores of the Pacific. The sun by day, and the moon by night, saw him toiling for nearly seventy years, as he pursued his lonely way in search of the hearth that needed his counsel, or hastened to the anxious expectant mother, covering from sixty to eighty miles in a daily circuit, and officiating in time at upwards of eleven thousand births; he was thus a true medical father to most of the people of his county. It was noted once that out of a party of sixteen dancers he had brought fourteen into the world, and had at- tended two others on delicate occasions some thirteen times . . . He possessed fortu- nately the sinews necessary for such arduous and often continuous diurnal and nocturnal duties .... His knowledge and his judg- ment seemed miraculous to trusting, devoted followers ; he never halted nor hesitated. He secured the confidence and cooperation of pa- tients by listening to their whims, which he never treated with contempt, and he was ever willing to explain fully the nature of the dis- ease and its treatment even to the most humble. Dorsey's "Elements of Surgery" states that Dr. Frederick Dorsey, of Maryland, tied the middle meningeal artery with needle and liga- ture for the first time. He practised general surgery extensively and early used anesthetics. His chief resources were bleeding, calomel, tartar emetic and antimony; but the first two were the Alpha and Omega of practice. His drastic methods, better suited perhaps to more vigorous constitutions in ruder times, are illustrated by the comment of a Philadel- phia patient, for whom he had prescribed five grains super carbonate soda every two hours, with twenty grains of calomel at night, and forty grains of jalap in the morning; to an en- quiry after his health he replied : "Old Dorsev, of Hagerstown, took me through a thrashing
