Page:American Medical Biographies - Kelly, Burrage.djvu/526

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HASTINGS
504
HAWKES

ture and botany, and his orchard and garden were remarkable for that time. He was constantly trying to obtain better and hardier fruits, and took great satisfaction in making experiments with scions sent him from distant parts of the country. Among his trees he cultivated some mulberries on which he raised silkworms, and silk was spun from the fibre produced.

He had a large botanical garden in which all native plants that could be induced to grow there were to be found, together with many sent him by correspondents from other sections of the country. Students who were pursuing a course in medicine with him required to work in this garden. In this way an opportunity was given them to become acquainted with the plants and in many of these young men a love for botany was inspired that influenced their later lives. Samuel Beach Bradley (q. v.) was one of the students who thus acquired his first knowledge of, and interest in, that science. Poppies were largely cultivated in the garden, and the juice carefully collected, was made into opium, which was used in the doctor's practice. Others of the herbs grown there, also played their part in curing the ailments of his patients, for in that early day doctors had to rely on themselves for many of their remedies.

There were few surgical appliances at this time, and for the simple operations requiring instruments, Dr. Hastings made designs which were worked out by the village blacksmith.

To Dr. Hastings and his wife, Huldah, fifteen children were born, fourteen of whom reached maturity. To all of these he gave good educations, four of his eight sons graduating from Hamilton College, two of them becoming physicians, one a Presbyterian minister, one a missionary to Ceylon, one a lawyer, one a landscape architect, one a civil engineer, and one a wholesale merchant.

An old-time daguerreotype, taken in the 40s, shows Dr. Hastings as a remarkably fine looking man with well shaped head, high forehead, snowwhite hair but youthful looking face and very keen, bright eyes. When in his seventieth year he was stricken with paralysis, and for ten years confined to a wheeled chair, unable to speak, but retaining his mental faculties, and until the last interested in scientific subjects and in all the stirring events preceding the Civil War. His death occured in Clinton, March 26, 1861.

Hawes, Jesse (1843–1901).

Jesse Hawes was born in Corinna, Maine, August 21, 1843, and practised chiefly in Greeley, Weld County, Colorado, his death occurring there from angina pectoris, August 4, 1901.

He had prepared to enter Bowdoin College when the Civil War broke out and he enlisted at once in the ninth Illinois cavalry, the family having shortly before moved to that state. He served through the war, being confined in Cahaba Prison for nearly a year, an experience he embodied in "Cahaba," a volume published about 1890.

From 1865 to 1868 he studied in the University of Michigan and graduated M. D. from Long Island College Hospital in 1871. For some time afterwards he studied in Edinburgh, Scotland, but the exact date is not known.

In 1874 he married Clementine Rockwell, and one child, a daughter, Mary Moneta, was born.

He was president of the Colorado State Medical Society in 1884 and professor of obstetrics in the University of Denver for some years.

He wrote many brief articles upon surgical subjects, published in the "Transactions of the American Medical Association of the Colorado State Society." His "Report upon Charlatanism in Colorado" appeared in their Transactions for 1883.

At the beginning of his practice in Greeley Dr. Hawes lost several cases in succession from puerperal fever. This misfortune worked so against the increase in his practice that for years he struggled with poverty. No doubt the increased effort he made to win back the confidence of those families which had left him on this account was responsible for the fact that he finally became the leading obstetrician of the northern part of the state, and a teacher of obstetrics in the University of Denver.

Hall's Hist. of Colorado. Portrait.

Hawkes, Micajah Collins (1785–1863).

The student of American medical history will find hardly another physician who so completely occupied the attention of medical circles throughout the nation as did Dr. Hawkes from 1821 to 1826, for during those five years the case of Lowell versus Faxon and Hawkes was the one which attracted universal interest in medical literature and at the meetings of the state medical societies.

Micajah Collins Hawkes, the son of Matthew and Ruth Collins Hawkes, was born in Lynn,