Hall, Lyman (1731–1790).
Lyman Hall, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, was born in Connecticut in 1731, graduated A. B. from Yale in 1747 and studied medicine with a local physician. He married in 1752 and accompanied by several families, removed to South Carolina. After a brief agricultural experiment with uncertain results, the families with which he came from the North, moved with him to Sunbury, a small village near the coast of Georgia, south of Savannah. He made a good living as a country practitioner and with the beginning of the revolution espoused its cause. Being blessed with the art of oratory to an unusual degree, he spoke far and wide and succeeded in persuading his neighbors to elect him a delegate to the Continental Congress in 1775. This early patriotic action of St. John's Parish at a time when there was opposition in Georgia to the articles and declaration of the General Congress led later to an act of the legislature, creating St. John, St. Andrew and St. James parishes, "Liberty County." Until Georgia was fully represented in the Congress Dr. Hall declined to vote upon questions which were to be decided by vote of the colonies, but he participated in the debates and recorded his opinions. When it came to the signing of the Declaration on the part of the State, Dr. Hall presented credentials, May 20, 1776, and early in June signed for the State of Georgia, with two others. He was elected a member of Congress for three successive terms and then declined another nomination.
When the British captured the forts in Savannah, the property of Dr. Hall was confiscated and he spent a year in the North with his relatives in Connecticut. On his return he settled in another part of Georgia, in Burke County, and practised there until he was elected Governor in 1783, and died while still in practice, October 19, 1790. Hall County in northern Georgia was subsequently named for him.
An olden-time biographer says of him: "He was six feet high, with easy and polite manners and deportment."
Hall, Moses Smith (1824–1905).
Moses Hall was born at Hawley, Massachusetts, March 1, 1824, and died at Parkersburg, West Virginia, April 9, 1905.
Dr. Hall came to Ritchie County, West Virginia, in 1844, and read medicine with Dr. (Gen.) Thomas M. Harris, of Harrisville, and attended the Louisville Medical University. He held an arduous country practice in Harrisville up to 1861, and in 1861 recruited a company for service in the Union Service, serving as its captain until May, 1862, when he was promoted to be lieutenant-colonel of the tenth Regiment of West Virginia Volunteers; was twice wounded and on his discharge in April, 1865, resumed practice at Harrisville, where he became the leading practitioner, also serving in the Legislature of 1874, and while there introducting a bill to regulate the practice of medicine and surgery in West Virginia. It was defeated and such action delayed until 1881. He was a member of the West Virginia State Medical Society, and its president in 1874. In 1850 he married Ellen F. Sampson of Athens, Ohio. Two daughters survived.
Hall, Randolph N. (1844–1900).
Randolph N. Hall, the first to operate on the vermiform appendix in the United States, was born at Eagleville, Ashtabula County, Ohio, on April 2, 1844, graduated at Rush Medical College in 1882, and died of apoplexy on December 30, 1900.
He took his M. D. at the medical college of Keokuk, Iowa, and after practising in Iowa and Kansas came to Chicago, where he practised for twenty years. During the Civil War he acted first as drummer boy in the battle of Shiloh, but was captured and spent eight months in prison. When exchanged he fought through the Mississippi campaign and afterwards in the Veteran Corps of the Army of the Tennessee and underwent a second imprisonment. In Chicago he was president of the Pathological Society; lecturer in the College of Physicians and Surgeons on anatomy and surgery and professor and president of the Illinois Medical College.
He performed the first operation on the appendix in the United States (the third on record), in May, 1886, and published it the following month in the New York Medical Journal. The patient, a boy of seventeen, had had a reducible inguinal hernia since childhood.
This claim, if the qualifications are borne in mind, seems to be fully justified, for Krönlein's case, it will be remembered, did not recover, and that of Symonds was not performed for perforative peritonitis, nor did he resect the appendix. Hall's operation was un-
