TEFFRIES 620 JEFFRIES Association for the Advancement of Science. He was also one of the founders of the Bos- ton Society of Natural History and he was a lecturer at the Berkshire Medical Institution and served as surgeon in Boston Harbor from 1862 to 1865 during the Civil war. He be- longed to various social and yachting clubs. Dr. Jeffries married, in January, 1872, Miss Marian Shimmin and of the union there were born two children, a son who died while in college and a daughter who became the wife of Dr. James H. Means of Boston. Dr. Jeffries was a man of sunny disposition, a fact that is well nigh obvious from all of his published portraits. It was indeed a happy and almost prescient impulse which induced his parents to place in the very center of his name "that shining monosyllable, Joy." For joy was the central characteristic of Dr. Jef- fries' being — joy for himself and joy for oth- ers also. Anyone who met him was almost made to think involuntarily of that old Greek form of address, xaipete, rejoice. The Doc- tor, himself, in fact, who was something of a punster, would sometimes joke about the mon- osyllabic center of his name. Thus, when yachting — a pastime of which he was very fond — he would now and then burst out to his friends, "Ah! This is what I call joy riding — excuse me, Joy-Jeffries riding." Dr. Jeffries', wife died in 1888, and after that time he lived with his daughter in the old family mansion at 15 ChestifUt Street. He retired from practice in 1912, because of fail- ing health, and passed from life, after a brief illness from pneumonia, on Nov. 21, 1915, leav- ing to the Boston Medical Library a very com- plete library on ophthalmology, especially full in titles on color-blindness, and in autograph letters. Thomas Hall Shastid. Phys. & Surgs. of the U. S., W. B. Atkinson, 1878, p. 80. Biog. of Emtn. Amer. Phys. and Surgs., R. F. Stone. 1894, p. 200. Universities and Their Sons, vol. ii, p. 285. Por- trait. Biographisches Lexikon der Aerzte, vol. iii, p. 391. Private sources. Jeffries, John (1745-1819) This picturesque loyalist pupil of Dr. James Lloyd, of Boston, was born in that town, Feb- ruary 5, 1745, graduated at Harvard in 1763 and studied abroad, where he received an M.D. at Aberdeen in 1769. Educated under Hunter, Smcllie and Warner, Broussais considered him the leader of medical opinion in America, ac- cording to O. W. Holmes. In 1771 Admiral Montague, commander in chief of the British North American Squadron, appointed Jeffries assistant surgeon of a ship of the line, with a hospital on shore, a position he held until 1774. His British sympathies held true dur- ing the Revolution. It was he who identified the body of Joseph Warren, his intimate friend, to General Howe after the battle of Bunker Hill. After the evacuation of Boston he accompanied the British to Halifax and eventually was appointed surgeon-major to the forces in America, settling in England at the close of the war. In 1784 he made the first balloon voyage over London, dropping cards of greeting to admiring friends below. This ascent was made for scientific study of the air at high levels, and not solely for spectacular purposes. Jeffries carried with him a reliable barometer, a thermometer of special make, a hygrometer, an electrometer, a mariner's com- pass, and seven small bottles for obtaining samples of air at different heights. He reached an elevation certainly exceeding 6560 feet; and his observations were turned over to the Royal Society to be discussed; and they were analyzed by no less a chemist than Cav- endish. On January 7, 1785, about five weeks after the London ascent, Jeffries crossed the English Channel, leaving the cliffs of Dover and landing with his aeronaut in the forest of Guines, in Artois, near the Field of the Cloth of Gold. Jeffries was a keen meteorologist, one whose interest did not flag with advancing years. He kept detailed records of the weather in Bos- ton from 1774 until March 4, 1776, when they were evidently interrupted by the war, and again from 1790 until 1816. These are now in the library of the Blue Hill Meteorological Observatory and are greatly prized as au- thentic climatic data. The year 1790 marked the return of Jeffries to Boston, when he practised surgery, medi- cine and midwifery until near the time of his death, September 16, 1819, from strangulated hernia. James Thacher says that he delivered the first public lecture in anatomy in Boston and that on the second evening a mob col- lected and carried off his subject, the body of a convict. His love of anatomy continued through his life. At his death he had one of the most valuable private libraries in the coun- try. He published a "Narrative of Two Aerial Voyages," London, 1786. His methodical hab- its are attested by the diary he kept for more than forty years, recording all his important cases in medicine and surgery and nearly two thousand cases of midwifery he had attended; this besides making three entries a day in fus meteorological journal. His son, John Jef- fries (1796-1876), made a specialty of oph-
