SKETCH OF DR. AUSTIN FLINT, Jr. 103 



SKETCH OF DR. AUSTIN FLINT, Jr. 



THIS gentleman has won his scientific eminence in the field of 

 physiology. Though but forty years of age, he has attained the 

 highest rank in his chosen department as an experimental inquirer, 

 teacher, and author having published the most elaborate treatise 

 upon the subject of physiology in the English language. 



The name of Flint is now famous in the medical world through 

 the celebrity of both father and son ; but there is probably a factor 

 of inherited genius in this line which goes to their making up, for 

 they have come from a long race of doctors. This is the genetic line 

 of the generations of medical Flints, so far as Americans will be inter- 

 ested to know it. They are descended from Thomas Flint, who came 

 from Matlock, Derbyshire, England, in 1638, and settled in Concord, 

 Massachusetts. Edward Flint, physician of Shrewsbury, Mass., was 

 father of the great-grandfather of the subject of this sketch. The 

 great-grandfather, Austin Flint, after whom the contemporary Flints 

 are named, was a physician who died at Leicester, Massachusetts, in 

 1850, over ninety years of age. He served as a private soldier and 

 afterward as a surgeon in the Revolutionary War. The grandfather 

 of Austin, Jr., was Joseph Henshaw Flint, a distinguished surgeon of 

 Northampton, Massachusetts, and afterward of Springfield, in the 

 same State. His father is Austin Flint, now an eminent physician in 

 New York City. He was born at Petersham, Massachusetts, in 1812, 

 and graduated M. D. at Harvard, in 1833. He is a voluminous author 

 and a distinguished practitioner. 



Austin Flint, Jr., was born at Northampton, Massachusetts, March 

 28, 1836, and his parents removed to Buffalo, New York, in the same 

 year. He was educated at private schools in that city, and, when 

 fifteen, he spent a year in the Academy of Leicester, Massachusetts. 

 He prepared for college at Buffalo, and entered Harvard University 

 as Freshman in 1852. He left the university in 1853, and spent a year 

 in the study of civil-engineering. He began the study of medicine 

 in the spring of 1854 at Buffalo, and attended two courses of lectures 

 at the medical department of the University of Louisville (l854-'55 

 and 1855-56). His taste for physiology was early developed, and he 

 made some experiments on living animals for Prof. Yandell, of the 

 Louisville school, while he was a student there. His final course of 

 lectures was taken at Jefferson Medical College, Philadelphia, in 1856- 

 '57, and at the close of the course he graduated. His inaugural thesis 

 on the "Phenomena of the Capillary Circulation" was honored with 

 the recommendation to be published, and appeared in the American 

 Journal of Medical Sciences in July, 1857. It was based upon numer- 

 ous original experiments. He was editor for three years (1857-'60) 



