| SKETCH OF DR. AUSTIN FLINT, Jr. |
THIS gentleman has won his scientific eminence in the field of physiology. Though but forty years of age, he has attained the highest rank in his chosen department as an experimental inquirer, teacher, and author—having published the most elaborate treatise upon the subject of physiology in the English language.
The name of Flint is now famous in the medical world through the celebrity of both father and son; but there is probably a factor of inherited genius in this line which goes to their making up, for they have come from a long race of doctors. This is the genetic line of the generations of medical Flints, so far as Americans will be interested to know it. They are descended from Thomas Flint, who came from Matlock, Derbyshire, England, in 1638, and settled in Concord, Massachusetts. Edward Flint, physician of Shrewsbury, Mass., was father of the great-grandfather of the subject of this sketch. The great-grandfather, Austin Flint, after whom the contemporary Flints are named, was a physician who died at Leicester, Massachusetts, in 1850, over ninety years of age. He served as a private soldier and afterward as a surgeon in the Revolutionary War. The grandfather of Austin, Jr., was Joseph Henshaw Flint, a distinguished surgeon of Northampton, Massachusetts, and afterward of Springfield, in the same State. His father is Austin Flint, now an eminent physician in New York City. He was born at Petersham, Massachusetts, in 1812, and graduated M. D. at Harvard, in 1833. He is a voluminous author and a distinguished practitioner.
Austin Flint, Jr., was born at Northampton, Massachusetts, March 28, 1836, and his parents removed to Buffalo, New York, in the same year. He was educated at private schools in that city, and, when fifteen, he spent a year in the Academy of Leicester, Massachusetts. He prepared for college at Buffalo, and entered Harvard University as Freshman in 1852. He left the university in 1853, and spent a year in the study of civil-engineering. He began the study of medicine in the spring of 1854 at Buffalo, and attended two courses of lectures at the medical department of the University of Louisville (1854-'55 and 1855-'56). His taste for physiology was early developed, and he made some experiments on living animals for Prof. Yandell, of the Louisville school, while he was a student there. His final course of lectures was taken at Jefferson Medical College, Philadelphia, in 1856-'57, and at the close of the course he graduated. His inaugural thesis on the "Phenomena of the Capillary Circulation" was honored with the recommendation to be published, and appeared in the American Journal of Medical Sciences in July, 1857. It was based upon numerous original experiments. He was editor for three years (1857-'60)
