Young, Daniel S. (1827–1902)
Daniel S. Young, surgeon, artist and inventor, was born in New York in 1827 and graduated in medicine at the Albany Medical College, New York, in 1855, settling in Cincinnati. During the war he was surgeon of the 21st Regiment Ohio Volunteer Infantry, afterward lecturing on surgery in the Cincinnati College of Medicine and Surgery. He contributed some valuable papers on military surgery to the Cincinnati Journal of Medicine, which was edited by G. C. Blackman, accompanying them with beautiful colored illustrations, all his own work, he being an expert draftsman, painter, engraver, lithographer and block-cutter. Young was engaged in writing a "Surgical History of the Civil War," but abandoned the work when the War Department announced the preparation of such a work by the surgeon-general's office. He was for some years connected with the surgical staff of the Cincinnati Hospital and had a wide reputation as a surgeon and obstetrician. He died in 1902.
Dan Young, as he was known, was a versatile man. Years ago he discovered that zinc plates might be used for engraving but never thought of patenting his invention. He was a master of the art of etching and modelling; and some beautiful samples of his work are to be found in the library of the Cincinnati Hospital. He was also a violin-maker; in fact, there was hardly any kind of handiwork in which he did not excel. In making splints or dressings of any kind he was quick as he was resourceful and artistic. It is but natural to suppose that he possessed the eccentricities of genius to a liberal extent.
Young in 1867 reported a case of gangrene of the heart, a pathological curiosity. In 1880 he made a drawing within twelve hours after the shooting of President Garfield, showing the exact location of the bullet; and the autopsy, made many weeks later, proved the correctness of Young's diagram.
Young, John Richardson (1782–1804)
John Richardson Young, America's pioneer medical scientist, was born in Hagerstown (then Elizabethtown) Maryland, in 1782, son of Dr. Samuel and Ann Richardson Young. His mother died in 1791, at the age of 31, leaving, besides John Richardson, two girls, Elizabeth and Martha, aged 8 and 6.
John went to Princeton University (then the College of New Jersey) and while there became a member of the undergraduate "Cliosophic Society." He graduated in 1799, and returning home, soon after took up the study of medicine with his father.
The elder Young was born in County Down, Ireland, in 1730 and came to this country before the Revolution, being a widely known physician and enterprising citizen of Hagerstown. He was a graduate of Trinity College, Dublin, and educated in medicine in Edinburgh. He died in Hagerstown in 1838. The son bears tribute to indebtedness to his father for "paternal kindness and first principles in medicine" in his thesis in 1803.
John R. Young's thesis on graduating at the University of Pennsylvania was entitled, "An Experimental Inquiry into the Principles of Nutrition and the Digestive Process," and this constitutes his one great claim to fame.
Young's work on digestion was based on experiments on our big bull frog with its capacious accommodating gullet; the results were far in advance of anything that had heretofore been done for physiology in this country; he demonstrated for the first time that digestion was effected by an acid secreted by the stomach, that it checked putrefaction, and he rejected the idea that digestion was a process of trituration, fermentation or putrefaction. He says: "We would, therefore, explain this process in a few words. Aliment is dissolved by the gastric menstruum; it then passes into the duodenum and meets with bile and pancreatic liquor; after being united with these, a heterogeneous mass is formed called chyme, and from this lacteals secrete chyle."
Young's thesis was published in Philadelphia in 1803, and was reprinted in Caldwall's Medical Theses in 1805. Two other writings of his have been found in Benjamin Smith Barton's Philadelphia Medical and Physical Journal for 1804, one of these is a brief excerpt from a letter of Young's but valuable as adding to the little that can be found of him.
A more interesting work is a manuscript found among the few effects preserved by descendants of the family; this is evidently a paper prepared for a general audience, setting forth in non-technical language the process of digestion as known before his experiments on frogs and snakes.
In one year from the time he graduated, he died in Hagerstown, June 8, 1804, in the
