State Medical Society." His knowledge of practical therapeutics was marvelous, which made him an accurate clinician, and his skill in surgery was great, his office being always an attraction for medical students.
The confidence of the people was unbounded. Some of his admirers said, with Calvinistic logic, if "we're tae dee, we're tae, and if we're to live, we're to live," but all said this for the doctor, "that whether you are to live or die, he can aye keep up a sharp moisture on the skin."
Dr. Skillman was active in all public matters and greatly interested in everything pertaining to the growth and prosperity of his native city. He died at Lexington in March, 1902.
Slack, Elijah (1784–1866)
Elijah Slack was both M. D. and LL. D. and was born in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, November 6, 1784, graduating at Princeton in 1810 and soon after taking charge of an academy at Trenton, and subsequently being professor of natural sciences, and vice-president in Princeton College.
In 1817 he went to Cincinnati and in 1819, when the Medical College of Ohio was organized, was appointed professor of chemistry, a position he held for fourteen years.
He was also a minister of the Presbyterian Church. During the whole of his active life he was a teacher. Dr. Slack was the first president of the Cincinnati Medical Society, which was organized in 1819. He was also first president of Cincinnati College, incorporated the same year. He died May 29, 1866.
Slade, Daniel Denison (1823–1896)
Daniel Denison Slade, veterinarian, zoologist, and author, was born on Beacon Hill, Boston, May 10, 1823, and died in his home at Chestnut Hill, near Boston, February 11, 1896. He was the son of J. T. Slade, a New England business man who had travelled as far as St. Petersburg, Russia, in mercantile pursuits, a tall man of captivating personal appearance and fine physique. He married Elizabeth Rogers, daughter of Daniel Denison Rogers, a Boston merchant, and their son inherited his father's physique and constitution. Daniel lost his mother when three years old and was brought up under the guardianship of his uncle, Henry Bromfield Rogers, living in his maternal grandfather's house on Beacon Street and attending the public schools until he was ten years old. After going to school in Jamaica Plain, Waltham and Northborough, he fitted for Harvard College at the Boston Latin School and graduated from college in 1844 in the class with Francis Parkman, Leverett Saltonstall and George S. Hale. While in college he evinced a fondness for natural history and served successively as vice-president, treasurer, president and curator of ornithology and geology of the Harvard Natural History Society. During the summer and winter of 1844, Slade was associated with the historian, Jared Sparks, copying original documents relating to the American Revolution. Entering Harvard Medical School in 1845, he there came in contact with Oliver Wendell Holmes (q. v.), whose friendship he enjoyed throughout life. In the summer of 1846 he became a student in the office of Dr. Amos Twitchell (q. v.), of Keene, New Hampshire, and in October of that year was present at the first capital operation under ether at the Massachusetts General Hospital. When he had received his doctor's degree in 1848 he served as house surgeon at the Massachusetts General Hospital for a year and then spent three years in professional study abroad, mostly in Dublin and Paris. Besides being resident pupil at the Lying-in Hospital at Rutland Square, Dublin, he studied two months at the National Veterinary School at Alfort, France.
Settling in Boston in 1852 Slade became an attending surgeon at the Boston Dispensary, translated Ricord's "Letters on Syphilis" with an analysis, gave twelve veterinary lectures at the State House and contributed several articles to the medical journals, most of them signed "Medicus." He was a successful competitor for four medical prizes essays—the Boylston of 1857, that of the Massachusetts Medical Society in 1859, and the Fiske Fund in 1860 and 1862. The paper on diphtheria, after being published in 1861 and again in 1864, was found worthy of being republished thirty-six years later, in spite of the advances that had been made in the scientific study of this disease during the intervening years.
Dr. Slade did much to raise the standard of veterinary surgery in Boston and became the first president of the veterinary society; the lectures on this subject that he gave at the State House were given at the instance of the Massachusetts Society for the Promotion of Agriculture. He wrote papers on the importance to the farmer of a knowledge of the physiology of animals (Massachusetts Ploughman, 1865); the horse epidemic, in the same publication, 1872; how to kill animals humanely, 1879.
