Page:A cyclopedia of American medical biography vol. 1.djvu/168

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only to be understood and never for effect. His career in Virginia furnishes one of the very few instances in which a surgeon with a large and successful practice has left behind him an enduring reputation, though his work was done in a remote country district. Virginia has furnished another still more remarkable instance in the career of Dr. J. P. Mettauer. Dr. Baynham married a daughter of the Rev. John Mathews of Essex County. He died on the eighth of December, 1814, on the day after he had completed the sixty- sixth year of a useful and laborious life. He did two successful operations for ectopic pregnancy, one in 1790, the second in 1799, and he is supposed to have been the first surgeon who did this successfully. His account of these operations was published in the "New York Medical and Physical Journal and Review," vol. i. Several posthumous accounts of surgical cases were published in the "Philadelphia Journal of Medical and Physicial Sciences." R. M. S.

Phila. Jour. Med. and Phys. Scs., vol. iv, 1S22-

Beard, George Miller (1839-18S3).

George M. Beard, neurologist, was the son of the Rev. S. F. Beard, Congre- gationalist minister, and was born at Montville, Connecticut, in 1839; prepared for college at Andover, Massachusetts. He entered Yale, graduating in 1682. As an undergraduate he was prominent as a scholar, writer and debater and received the Townsend premium. He graduated at the College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1866. Between his first and second course of lectures he served for one year as Assistant Surgeon in the United States Navy. In 1S66 he became associated with Dr. A. D. Rockwell, for the study of nervous diseases, and especi- ally for the development of electricity in its relations to medicine and surgery. At the time when Dr. Beard began with Dr. Rockwell his researches in electro- therapeutics, electricity had not been used to any extent by physicians in this country, and very little abroad, except among a few specialists, and only by


i BEARD

local methods. Their first systematic contribution to the subject was a series of five articles "On the Medical Use of Electricity," with special reference to general electrization, and in which the constitutional tonic effects of electricity were first enunciated and demonstrated. These articles were not only quoted, but reprinted in full in various journals both in England and Germany. In 1872 he published with Dr. Rockwell the first edition of their larger work on "The Medi- cal and Surgical Uses of Electricity," which was translated into German, and had there a very large circulation. The methods of "general faradization" and " central galvanization," to the considera- tion of which the book is in part devoted, have been introduced into Germany through its translation, and have long been incorporated into its scientific literature. The study of medical elec- tricity led naturally and inevitably to the study of psychology, and in 1867 he published a paper on "The Longevity of Brain Workers," which demonstrated that those who live by brain live longer than those by muscle; that great men live longer than ordinary men. Following this came papers on the "Cosmic Law of Intemperance;" "A Plea for Scientific Reform," "Atmospheric Electricity and Ozone, Their Relations to Health and Disease;" "The Relation of the Medical Profession to the Popular Delusions of Animal Magnetism, Clairvoyance, Spirit- ualism, and Mind Reading;" "The Physiology of Mind Reading;" "Are Inebriates Automatons?" "The Asylums of Europe;" "Trance and Transoidal States in Lower Animals;" "How to Use the Bromides;" "Current Delusions Relating to Hypnotism;" "The Study of Trance and Muscle Reading, and Allied Nervous Phenomena in Europe and America, with a Letter upon the Moral Character of Trance Subjects;" "The Case of Guiteau, a Psychological Study;" "On the Moral Responsibility of the Insane," etc. etc. Beard gave much attention for many years to the recon- struction of the principles of evidence on