Anderson, Turner (1842–1908)
Turner Anderson, surgeon, was born in Meade County, Kentucky, August 11, 1842; his ancestors had come over here in 1770 with their relative Lord Stirling. Turner studied medicine at the Cincinnati College of Medicine and Surgery, graduating there in 1862 and settling to practise in Louisville.
Endowed with the courage which comes from a thorough acquaintance with a subject, he was a bold operator, with admirable technic. His first hundred laparotomies were all successful, and to him is ascribed priority in the subperitoneal treatment of the pedicle in hysterectomy. He promulgated Anderson's modification of Kelly's operation for perineorrhaphy and was the first surgeon west of the Alleghenies to do pneumonotomy for the draining of pulmonary abscess.
During the war he was assistant surgeon at Brown Hospital, Louisville, and afterwards surgeon major to the twenty-eighth Kentucky Infantry. When the fighting was over he married Anna Evans who died three years later, leaving him a daughter. His second wife was Sarah G., daughter of Judge Simrall, and three children survived him, Lulie, Cornelia and Simrall who became a doctor.
Anderson senior was a genial, clever but practical man greatly venerated by his students and a favorite with the faculty. His death, on the thirteenth of October, 1908, deprived Louisville of a fine surgeon and a good Christian citizen.
He was president of the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Louisville; a member of the Louisville Obstetrical Society, the Kentucky State Medical Society and its vice-president in 1874. He occupied the chair of materia medica and therapeutics in the University of Louisville and successively those of obstetrics and clinical gynecology.
Anderson, Washington Franklin (1823–1903)
Washington F. Anderson, for forty-six years a practitioner in Salt Lake City, Utah, was born in Williamsburg, Virginia, January 6, 1823, of English, Scotch and Irish ancestry, though his parents and grandparents were Americans. He attended medical lectures at the University of Virginia in 1841–1842, and the University of Maryland in 1843–1844, graduating from the latter in the last year.
He was a resident student of the Baltimore Almshouse Hospital from 1842 to 1844, where he had unusual privileges in dissection, post-mortem examination and pathology. Among the latter were studies in remittent fever, made with Dr. Charles Frick of Baltimore and published in the April number of the American Journal of the Medical Sciences, 1846.
He practised in Mobile, Alabama, until the Mexican War in 1846, when he joined the Alabama regiment and served in the ranks as orderly sergeant of his company. He finally settled in Salt Lake City and practised there until his death in 1903, doing much, with two physicians of recognized ability, Dr. John Milton Bernhisel and Dr. William France, an English physician, to maintain the integrity of the medical profession in Utah.
In 1876 Anderson was elected president of the first medical society in Utah.
He had an extensive practice in surgery. Cases of urinary calculi in young and old seem to have been very common; for many operations the necessary instruments were remodeled or fashioned by crude mechanics, the procuring of medical and surgical appliances from New York meaning months of waiting and uncertain transportation across the desert.
In 1881, when aseptic surgical technic was in its infancy, he performed a laparotomy for the removal of a large ovarian cyst, this being probably the first operation of the kind performed in Salt Lake City, the patient making a good recovery.
In 1862 he married Isabella Evans. Thirteen children, four boys and nine girls, were born, and three daughters received medical degrees from the University of Michigan.
He died in Salt Lake City, August 21, 1903.
Anderson, William
William Anderson, English surgeon and anatomist, who coming to the United States in 1820, thoroughly identified himself with American medicine, deserves a place in biographies of medical men of this country. He was a licentiate of the Royal College of Surgeons in Edinburgh. He lectured in New York on surgical anatomy to a class of students, holding the exercises in Murray Street; he spent some time in Philadelphia, and was professor of anatomy and physiology in the Vermont Academy of Medicine. His associates in New York were Valentine Mott and Wright Post; one of his pupils was David L. Rogers, author of "Description of a New Instrument for Ex-