war of the Rebellion. In 1861 he was elected captain of Company D, thirtieth North Carolina Troops. In the "Seven Days Fight" around Richmond he was terribly wounded in the right shoulder. Before he left the hospital, however, he was elected a member of the House of Commons of the State of North Carolina. In 1864 he was re-elected. During the time of his service in this capacity he was appointed by Gov. Vance assistant surgeon-general of North Carolina.
In 1868 he became superintendent of the Raleigh Insane Asylum—a position held till 1889. He was a member of numerous medical and other learned societies and was once vice-president of the Medico-Legal Society of New York. The degree of LL. D. was given him by Rutherford College in 1877.
He wrote much and well on insanity and other medico-legal subjects; perhaps among the most important of his papers is "Mechanical Protection from the Violent Insane" and "True and False Experts"—a controversy with William A. Hammond (q. v.), surgeon-general, United States Army.
Dr. Grissom married, January, 1866, Maria Anna Bryan, of Brunswick, North Carolina, and had two sons and three daughters.
Dr. Grissom was a heavy man, of fine physique, tall and well-proportioned, extremely strong and active. His complexion was dark; his hair, jet black; his eyes, steel-gray, clear, and penetrating. His manner was quick and animated, except when deciding important questions. Then he became extremely slow, thoughtful, and methodical. He was a noted entertainer and converser, and made many friends. He was a man of varied interests, and widely read in history, philosophy, poetry, fiction, and in general as well as medical science and an incessant student of the Bible.
He was one of those who "toil terribly," and mental breakdown was the inevitable result. The wonder was that this came to him so late. Not long before the close of his life he presented, at times, certain symptoms of paresis. In this enfeebled mental condition he betook himself to cocaine, morphine, and various other drugs. On a Sunday morning (July 27, 1902) when the church-bells, which he had always very much loved to hear, were ringing, he died as the result of his own act. At the time he was sitting on the front porch at the house of his namesake son, in Washington, District of Columbia. Before the unsuspecting relatives could intervene the doctor had drawn a pistol, placed it to his head a little above the right ear, and fired. He was hurried to the Casualty Hospital, but died inside of an hour.
Gross, Samuel David (1805–1884)
In the Woodlands Cemetery, Philadelphia, is an urn containing the ashes of Samuel D. Gross with this inscription in part: "A master in surgery. He filled chairs in four medical colleges, in as many states of the union, and added lustre to them all. He recast surgical science as taught in North America, formulated anew its principles, enlarged its domain, added to its art, and imparted fresh impetus to its study. He composed many books and among them "A System of Surgery," which is read in different tongues, wherever the healing art is practised."
Samuel David Gross was born near Easton, Pennsylvania, July 8, 1805, and died in Philadelphia, May 6, 1884, having nearly completed his seventy-ninth year. He was the son of Philip and Johanna Juliana Gross, being the fifth of six children—two girls and four boys. His early years under the wise training of a good mother, to whose memory he rightly pays a just tribute, were spent amid the rustic labors and healthful pleasures of a Pennsylvania farm. This gave him a strong and vigorous body, without which he never could have performed a tithe of the labor which pre-eminently distinguished his long life. Before he was six years old he determined to be a surgeon, and early in his professional studies to be a teacher. Yet when he was fifteen he knew scarcely any English. Brought up among the sturdy, honest, laborious Pennsylvania Dutch, he could speak that curious English-German. But his English, of which he became so fluent a master, and even pure German, which he began to study at the same time, were learned almost as foreign tongues and as a result of his appreciation at that early age of his need for a better and wider education.
At seventeen he began the study of medicine as the private pupil of a country practitioner, but after learning some osteology with the aid of that tuppenny little compend, Fyfe's "Anatomy" and a skeleton, he gave up in despair, for again he found his intellectual tools unequal to his work. The little Latin he had was insufficient, and to understand the technicalities of medicine Greek was a sine
