Page:A cyclopedia of American medical biography vol. 2.djvu/421

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SHORT


371


SHRADY


the Plants of Kentucky;" "The BibHo- graphia Botanica" (1836) ; "Sketch of the Progress of Botany in Western America;" "Observations on Botany in Illinois" (1845).

An industrious botanist, and an effectual promoter of botany in this country, his great usefulness in this field was mainly owing to the extent and the particular excellence of his personal collections, and to the generous profusion with which he distributed them far and wide among his fellow-laborers in this and other lands. He and the late Mr. Oakes, the one in the West and the other in the East, but independently, were the first in this country to prepare on an ample scale dried specimens of uniform and superlative excellence and beauty, and in lavish abundance for the purpose of supplying all who could need them."

The name of Short is commemorated by a number of plants: the Genus Shortia, Vesicaria Shortii, Phaca Shortiana, Aster Shortii, Solidago Shortii, Carex Shortiana.

The little story in connection with the Shortia is that when Dr. Gray was in Paris in 1837 he saw in the herbarium of the elder Michaux a mutilated plant whose label simply stated that it came from "les hautes montagnes de Carolinie." He tried in vain on his return to find the plant, but unsuccessfully. Two years later he described the plant and dedi- cated it to C. W. Short, and it became the object of all botanists visiting the Carolinas to find it. In 1877 it was found accidentally by G. M. Hyams, a boy who had picked it up on the banks of the Catawba River near the town of Marion in McDowell County, North Carolina. (Letter from Asa Gray to Prof. Sargent, dated September 17, 1886.)

He was married to Mary Henry Churchill in November, 1815, and had one son and five daughters. Dr. Short died in Louisville, Kentuckj% March 7, 1864, of pneumonia.

T. L. B.

Tr. Amer. Phil. Soc, Phila., 1865.

S. D. Gross, Biographical Sketch of Charles

Wilkins Short, Philadelphia, 1865.


Shotwell, John T. (1807-1850).

John Shotwell was born in Mason County, Kentucky, January 10, 1807, to which place his parents had emigrated from New Jersey at an early period in the history of the West.

The boy's early love of Uterature determined his father to give him a liberal education, so the family moved to Lexington, Kentucky, and the son entered Transylvania University in 1822, and graduated in 1825, with so high a reputation that Dr. Drake persuaded him to take up medicine. He began to study with Dr. Drake in 1826, and became his partner in 1830. In 1832 he received his M. D. from the medical College of Ohio, and was immediately appointed adjunct professor of anatomy to his friend. Dr. Jedediah Cobb.

In 1832 he married Mary Ward, daughter of John P. Foote of Cincinnati.

He was demonstrator of anatomy in the Medical College of Ohio from 1836 to 1838 and in the latter year succeeded Dr. Cobb as professor of anatomy, occupying this chair, with the exception of the session of 1849-50, until his death.

In 1842 he went to Europe, to visit the great medical centers.

During the cholera of 1850 his strength was overtaxed, and, a victim to the im- portunities of his patients, and his de- sire to relieve the suffering, he died July 23, 1850.

A. G. D.

Cincin. Med. Observer, 1857, vol. ii. Tr. Ohio Med. Soc. Columbus, 1851.

Shrady, George Frederick (1837-1907).

George Shrady, no less known as a medical journalist than a surgeon, was born in New York on the fourteenth of January, 1837. He was educated at New York College and graduated from the College of Physicians and Surgeons, New York, and from the surgical division of the New York Hospital. Yale College gave him her M. A. in 1869 for promoting the interest of medical literature. He made his d6but as associate editor of the "American Medical Times" and became