202 DAVENPORT ACADEMY OF NATURAL SCIENCES. 



he was held by all who came in constant contact with him; and one 

 could almost imagine some of them as written by those of us who 

 were privileged to know him in his later years, so well do they describe 

 some of his traits. For instance, Paul Goddard and Robert Morris, 

 great physicians of that early day in Philadelphia, testify to his "high 

 professional qualifications, as well as his uniformly amiable and gen- 

 tlemanly deportment;" while George B. Wood, M. Clymer, Richard 

 Ashurst, W. E. Horner, Samuel Jackson, and N. Chapman, all men 

 whose names adorn the page of American medicine, speak in affec- 

 tionate terms of his professional attainments, his general scholarship, 

 his faithful service, his personal worth, and his unfailing amiability and 

 kindness. 



In 1845 he removed to New Orleans, to enter the ranks of active 

 practitioners, and did much of the regular work of his profession, both 

 in private practice and in hospital service, until 1847, when he entered 

 the United States Navy as assistant surgeon. Letters to his father still 

 exist, showing his extensive travel, during his naval service, in many 

 parts of the world, and full of evidences of that keen observation 

 which we all knew him capable of in his later years. It was during 

 this service, and while on duty on the schooner Taney, on the coast 

 of Africa, that he contracted that deafness which was, in his own esti- 

 mation, so great an affliction, and which caused him to shrink from 

 embracing so many opportunities of widening his sphere of useful- 

 ness, from a hyper-sensitive idea that communication with him was 

 laborious and annoying. Letters from his superiors in the service 

 during this period again mention his "skill and assiduity in his atten- 

 tion to the sick," and speak of his "deportment, both moral and pro- 

 fessional, as being such as to command the entire esteem of all his 

 associates." 



He resigned from the navy in 1855 to marry Miss Lydia Smith, of 

 Nashville, who, with four children, after a happy married life of nearly 

 thirty years duration, still survives him. After his marriage, he settled 

 in his native city to practise his profession, and was occupied in j^ro- 

 fessional pursuits of the usual kind till the outbreak of our civil war. 



Those of us who knew his love for the old flag (and he often spoke 

 of the impossibility of conceiving how one who had served his country 

 as an officer, and taken the oath required prior to such service, could 

 ever turn against that flag) can imagine the energy with which he threw 

 himself into the opposition to the secession movement in his native 

 State; and some of us who knew the fire in his nature can well under- 



