money to go to the University of Virginia, and later to the Jefferson Medical School in Philadelphia, from which he graduated in 1855. After serving a term as an interne in Blockley Hospital, he began to practise in Lynchburg.
He was a member of the American Association of Superintendents of Hospitals for the Insane, and the Medical Society of Virginia. Of this latter society he was several times a vice-president, president in 1887, and was elected an honorary member in 1888. He was also an ex-president of the Lynchburg Medical Association.
At the outbreak of the Civil War he was elected surgeon of the Lynchburg Home Guard, Company G., Eleventh Virginia Infantry, and went to the front with that command. He was soon put in charge of the hospital at Culpeper, and later was placed in command of the military hospital at Liberty (now Bedford City), where he remained until the end of the war, when he resumed practice in Lynchburg. He gave considerable attention to eye affections, without, however, becoming a specialist. He was one of the ninety-two charter members who founded the State Society in 1870. In 1890 he was elected superintendent of the Western State Hospital for the Insane at Staunton, and filled this position until his death.
Dr. Blackford was a Virginia gentleman of the true type, polite, gentlemanly, courteous, mindful of the feelings of others. As superintendent of the hospital, he filled the position with marked ability and success, adding many improvements to the institution, and ever looking after most carefully the well-being of his unfortunate charges.
He married, in 1871, Mrs. Emily Neilson Byrd, and was survived by six sons.
He died of pneumonia at his home in Staunton on December 13, 1905, just two weeks after the death of his wife from the same disease.
Blackie, George Stodart (1834–1881)
This professor of botany and chemistry came, like many another of his kind, from Scotland, a land which sent over many of America's earliest botanists.
Alexander Blackie, banker, of Aberdeen was the father, and the eccentric, erudite John Stuart Blackie the brother of John Stodart, who was born in Aberdeen on the tenth of April, 1834. After a capital general education at Aberdeen University and a course in medicine at Edinburgh he went to Germany and France, taking his A. M. and M. D. in Edinburgh.
He seems to have moved about a great deal at first; to the Mowcroft Private Asylum, London, as physician, then north again to Kelso, as a local practitioner, finally coming over to Nashville, Tennessee, in 1857 and remaining there for the rest of his life.
Besides being co-editor for twelve years of the Nashville Medical Journal, he contributed largely to the London Botanical Gazette and the North American Surgical Review. Three of his publications were "Cretins and Cretinism," 1885; "The Medical Flora of Tennessee," 1857, and "History of the Military Monkish Orders of the Middle Ages."
He held many appointments: professor of botany in the University of Nashville; professor of botany, Tennessee College of Pharmacy; professor of chemistry, Nashville Medical College; member of the Medico-Chirurgical Society, Edinburgh, and fellow of the Botanical Society of Edinburgh.
Blackman, George Curtis (1819–1871)
The second child of Judge Thomas Blackman, of the Surrogate Court of Newtown, Connecticut, he was born April 21, 1819. He had his preliminary education at Newtown and Bridgeport, Connecticut, and Newburg, New York, afterwards entering Yale College and graduating in medicine at the College of Physicians and Surgeons, New York, 1840, immediately after practising in the dispensaries in that city. Devotion to work so impaired his health that, at the suggestion of his friends, he went to Europe, acting as ship's surgeon, in which capacity he made many trips across the ocean and spent much time in London and Paris. In the former city he had to contend with great poverty.
In 1845 he spent some months in the London hospitals, living on seventy-five dollars, the sum-total of his means.
He was well acquainted with Liston, Astley Cooper, Sir Benjamin Brodie, Sir William Fergusson, and other eminent London doctors.
By invitation he read a paper before the Royal Medico-Chirurgical Society of London which so impressed the members by its depth of research and profound knowledge of the science and art of surgery that he was at once elected a member.
