MOSHER 827 MOTT College became his in 1865, and, in the same year, the registrarship and librarianship. To recount all of the various services of Dr. Mosher v^ould be a long task. The opera- tions performed, though many and skilful, constituted only a very small fraction of his service to mankind. He married, December 30, 1863, Emma Montgomery, of Albany, and had four sons and one daughter. Besides being a man of active life and wide- ranging sympathies. Dr. Mosher was an ex- pert in botany as well as in medicine. A bibliophile, also, he possessed a wonderful library of rare and curious volumes, and was an authority on prints and etchings, of which he had a large collection. As an expert witness, he was unsurpassed, and yet, busy as he was, his time was ever at the disposal of his friends and the poor. He died on the morning of August 13, 1883. For several days he had been complaining of pain about his heart, but neither his friends nor he had suspected anything serious. In the morning, his attendant could not rouse him by the loudest of knocking, and the doctor was found in his bed, dead, a book, one of his cherished volumes, tightly grasped in his hand. It is related by an intimate friend (and the anecdote is illustrative of Dr. Mosher's character) that, while the departed doctor's body was lying in state in the parlor of his home, a decrepit woman came into the cham- ber of death, and "cried to God to bring him back to her and her sick child." "The half crazed woman spoke," this correspondent says, "for thousands who felt the same deso- lation." Among the positions which Dr. Mosher held were : surgeon to Gov. Hoffman's staff, with rank of brigadier-general ; military superin- tendent and surgeon in charge of the Albany Hospital for disabled soldiers ; surgeon-gen- eral for New York ; deputy health and execu- tive officer of the port of New York; member of the commission of experts, appointed by President Hayes to study the origin and cause of the yellow-fever epidemic; member of the medical and surgical staffs of the Al'oany and St. Peter's Hospitals ; founder, trustee, and professor of the Albany College of Pharmacy; president of the faculty of the same institu- tion; and a member of innumerable medical societies. His most distinguished work was done as professor of medical jurisprudence and hygiene in the Albany Medical College. Thomas Hall Shastid. Albany Medical Annals. 1883. vol. iv. Trans. Med. Soc, N. V.. V. G. Tucker, M.D., Syracuse, 1885. Private Sources. Mott, Alexander Brown (1826-1889) It is always rather a doubtful privilege to be the son of an illustrious father, particu- larly when following in his profession, but Mott the younger was operating with his father when only twenty- four. He was the fourth son and fifth child of Dr. Valentine (q. V.) and Louisa Dunmore Mott and grand- son of Dr. Henry Mott, and was born in New York City the twenty-first of March," 1826. As a boy he went to Columbia College Grammar school. Then followed five years in Europe with his family, an experience in naval war- fare as a marine in 1844, and in a mixed fol- lowing of medicine and business at Havre, France. On returning home he graduated (in 1850) at the Vermont Academy of Medicine and took an M. D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1857. He had been helping his father before graduation and continued to do so, taking charge of the operating room and performing most of the operations in the surgical clinics. In 1851 he married the youngest daughter of Thaddeus Phelps and ten years later went oft to the war as brigade-surgeon and medi- cal director successively, helping to found the first United States Army General Hospital in New York, in which were received some 4,000 patients. This gave him an ample surgical experience. Among other operations he tied the common carotid nine times, twice ex- sected the entire ulna, and twice removed the entire lower jaw. He may justly be said to have transmitted to posterity the heritage of a name illustrious in surgery with added mem- ories of his own good work. On August 11, 1889, he died at his country house at Yonkers, after a two days' illness from pneumonia. Among his writings was : "Surgical Opera- tions and the Advantage of Clinical Teach- ing." His appointments included : senior surgeon. Mount Sinai Hospital ; surgeon, Bellevue Hos- pital ; surgeon. New York State Militia; co- founder and professor of anatomy in Bellevue Hospital Medical College. Med. and Surg. Reporter, Phila., 1864-5. Boston Med. & Surg. Jour., 1889. vol. cx.xi, 193. New York Med. Jour., 18S9, vol. 1, 214. There is a portrait in tlie Surg.-Gen.'s Library, Wash., D. C. Mott, Valentine (1785-1865) Valentine Mott, eminent New York surgeon, was born at Glen Cove, Oyster Bay, Long Island, on August 20, 1785, son of Dr. Henry Mott. As a schoolboy he had private tuition in Newton, Long Island, and then attended medical lectures at Columbia College, working as well under his relative. Dr. Valentine Sea-
