Hosack

maternal grandfather, Francis Arden, in New
York City. His father, a native of Elgin, Scot-
land, came to America as a British artillery of-
ficer and fought at the capture of Louisbourg.
David entered Columbia College in 1786, but
took his degree in arts at the College of New
Jersey (Princeton) in 1789. He began his medi-
cal studies in New York under Nicholas Ro-
mayne, Philip Wright Post, and Samuel Bard,
continued them in Philadelphia under Benjamin
Rush, and in 1791 began practice in Alexandria,
Va., expecting that city to become the federal
capital. The following year, having meanwhile
married Catharine Warner of Princeton, who
bore him one child, he left his wife and child with
his parents and sailed, in August, for further
study abroad. Visiting his father's relatives in
Scotland, he met socially most of the notables of
Edinburgh and studied medicine and botany in
that city. In London, later, he added mineralogy
to his studies, and during his sojourn there read
before the Royal Society a paper on vision which
was published in the Philosophical Transactions
for 1794. In that year he returned to America,
bringing with him a mineralogical collection
which he gave in 1821 to the college at Prince-
ton. During the voyage he won distinction
which contributed to his later professional repu-
tation, by his successful handling of an outbreak
of typhus among the steerage passengers.

In 1795 he became professor of botany at Co-
lumbia College and two years later, of materia
medica, holding both positions until 1811. The
success attending his treatment of his patients in
the yellow fever epidemic of 1797 gained him a
partnership with his former preceptor, Samuel
Bard [q.v.], to whose practice he succeeded. In
1804 he was attending surgeon at the Burr-
Hamilton duel. He was one of the first phy-
sicians in America to use the stethoscope, to ad-
vocate vaccination, and to limit the use of the
lancet, and was the first surgeon in America to
ligate the femoral artery for aneurysm (1808).
He taught materia medica in the newly chartered
College of Physicians and Surgeons, 1807-08,
and in 1811 resigned from Columbia to become
professor of the theory and practice of physic in
the new institution. He held annual lectureships
in materia medica and obstetrics, and from 1822
to 1826 was vice-president, but in the last-named
year withdrew, with four other members of the
faculty, to found the short-lived Rutgers Medical
College, of which he was president till 1830. In
1820 he was in great part responsible for the
founding of Bellevue Hospital.

With his pupil, later his partner, John W.
Francis [g.z>.], Hosack established the American

Hoshour

Medical and Philosophical Register, published
1810-14* He wrote a number of professional pa-
pers, some of them collected in Essays on Vari-
ous Subjects of Medical Science (vols. I, II,
1824; vol. Ill, 1830), and published A System of
Practical Nosology (1819). His Lectures on the
Theory and Practice of Physic, delivered at the
College of Physicians and Surgeons, was issued
posthumously in 1838. He was also the author
of A Tribute to the Memory of the Late Caspar
Wistar, M.D. (1818), A Biographical Memoir
of Hugh Williamson (1820), and a Memoir of
DeWitt Clinton (1829), and was one of the edi-
tors of William Smith's History of the Late
Province of New York (2 vols., 1829-30), pub-
lished by the New York Historical Society.

Although, according to his pupil Francis, Ho-
sack "was acknowledged ... to have been the
most eloquent and impressive teacher of scien-
tific medicine and clinical practice this country
has produced" (Old New York, p. 84), he was
as prominent in the social and cultural life of his
city as in the professional field. At his summer
home in Hyde Park he established the Elgin Bo-
tanical Garden, which has since become famous.
He was a founder of the New York Historical
Society and its president, 1820-28, and was an
incorporator, 1808, of the American Academy of
Fine Arts. "His house was the resort of the
learned and the enlightened," says Francis, add-
ing that it was once observed that DeWitt Clin-
ton, Bishop Hobart, and Dr. Hosack "were the
tripod upon which our city stood." Hosack's
first wife died only a few years after their mar-
riage, and in 1797 he married Mary Eddy of
Philadelphia, the adopted daughter of Caspar
Wistar [#.z/.]. She was the mother of nine chil-
dren, one of whom was Alexander Eddy Hosack
[g.z/.]. After her death, Hosack married as his
third wife Mrs. Magdalena Coster, a cousin of
Philip Hone [q.v.~\9 in whose diary he figures
frequently. He died suddenly of apoplexy in the
midst of his manifold activities.

[Sketch by A. E. Hosack, in S. D. Gross, Lives of
Eminent Am. Physicians and Surgeons (1861) ; sketch
by J. W. Francis, in S. W. Williams, Am. Medic. Biog.
(1845), and in Hist. Mag. (N. Y.)> June 1860; J. W.
Francis, Old New York (ed. of 1866); Autobiog. of
Samuel D. Gross (1887), II, 8/ff.; The Diary of Philip
Hone (2 vols., 1889), ed. by Bayard Tuckennan;
sketch, with A. B. Durand's engraving of portrait by
Sully, in James Herring and J. B. Longacre, The Nat.
Portr. Gallery of Eminent Americans, vol. II (1835) ;
Pop. Sci. Monthly, Oct. 1895; Evening Post (N. Y.),
Dec. 23,24, 1835.] E.P.

HOSHOUR, SAMUEL KLINEFELTER

(Dec. 9, i8os-Nov. 29, 1883), clergyman, pi-
oneer educator in eastern Indiana, was born in
Heidelburg township, York County, Pa., his
great-great-grandfather having immigrated to

240