The New International Encyclopædia/Parker, Willard

PARKER, Willard (1800-84). An American surgeon, born at Lyndeborough, N. H. He graduated from Harvard in 1820, and from its medical school in 1830, when he was made professor of anatomy in Vermont Medical College, and in the same year professor of anatomy in the Berkshire Medical College, in which latter institution he became professor of surgery in 1833. The following year was spent in the hospitals of London and Paris; and upon his return he was appointed professor of surgery at the College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York City, a post he occupied for thirty years. He then became professor of clinical surgery. In 1854 he first described and reported cases of what is now known as malignant pustule. In 1865 he was made president of the New York State Inebriate Asylum at Binghamton, and in 1867 a member of the Metropolitan Board of Health. He was the first to point out the phenomenon of concussion of the nerves, as distinguished from that of the nerve centres, a condition which had previously been confounded with congestion or inflammation. Dr. Parker made several important discoveries in practical surgery, among which were the operation of cystotomy for the relief of certain cases of chronic cystitis, and that for the cure of abscess near the vermiform appendix, called at that time perityphlitis. He was also a successful operator in many important cases of ligature of the larger arteries. Consult his biography in Medical Record, xxv. 492 (New York, 1884).