WOOD, ISAAC. 



WORKS, PUBLIC. 



769 



he resigned, and not long after again opened 

 an office in Pearl Street, near Peck Slip. In 

 1840 he removed to East Broadway, and in 

 1857, like many of his professional brethren, 

 migrated up-town. 



These more than fifty years of active profes- 

 sional life were years of great usefulness. From 

 early life he had been a member of the Society 

 of Friends, and possessed in an extraordinary 

 degree their spirit of quiet yet earnest philan- 

 thropy. He was not content unless his time 

 could be fully occupied in enterprises for the 

 benefit of humanity, and on this account he 

 took upon himself many positions of care 

 and toil, which brought him no other remuner- 

 ation than the consciousness of doing good. 

 He was, as we have already said, one of the 

 physicians of the New York Dispensary, and 

 retained this position till 1825 ; in 1823 he ac- 

 cepted the office of consulting accoucheur to 

 the Out-door Lying-in-Charity of the Second 

 Ward, a position involving much responsibility 

 and labor; in 1825 he became one of the 

 active members of the Society for the Refor- 

 mation of Juvenile Delinquents, of which his 

 father and elder brother had been the principal 

 founders ; in April of the same year he was 

 appointed by the Common Council a commit- 

 tee, with Drs. Bailey, J. M. Smith, and Stephen 

 Brown, to visit the penitentiary and report on 

 the measures necessary to eradicate typhus 

 fever, which was making fearful ravages there; 

 In October, 1825, he was appointed consulting 

 physician to the Bellevue Almshouse and Peni- 

 tentiary; and in January, 1826, elected by the 

 Common Council resident physician to Belle- 

 vue Hospital, Almshouse, and Penitentiary, 

 where he remained for seven years, and was, as 

 Dr. John W. Francis said in his " Old New 

 York," " of signal benefit to the public inter- 

 ests and to humanity." He performed nearly all 

 the important surgical operations during his 

 residency, and in 1832-'33, during the cholera 

 epidemic, stayed at his post, though more than 

 six hundred fatal cases of the disease occurred 

 among the inmates of the county institutions. 

 He was himself attacked by the disease, and 

 though he recovered, thanks to his temperate 

 habits and his fine constitution, his health was 

 so much impaired that he was obliged to resign 

 his position, and he was not fully restored to 

 his former vigor for five years. He was a 

 member of the New York Eye and Ear Infirm- 

 ary during this period, and for many years sub- 

 sequently maintained a very high reputation as 

 an ophthalmic surgeon, the benefits of which 

 enured to the advantage of the New York In- 

 stitution for the Blind, of which he was for 

 twenty-five years one of the most active 

 managers, being the consulting physician, and 

 for several years its president. He was one of 

 the founders of the Society for the Relief 'of 

 the Widows and Orphans of Medical Men, 

 and subsequently its treasurer and president ; 

 he was also a founder and twice president 

 of the New York Academy of Medicine. 

 VOL. vni. i9 A 



For many years he was president of the 

 Bellevue Hospital Medical Board. He was 

 also one of the managers of the New York 

 Lying-in-Asylum, and a consulting physician 

 of the New York City Dispensary, and from 

 1853 also of the New York Ophthalmic Hos- 



Sital. He was president repeatedly of the 

 ounty Medical Society, and of the Kappa 

 Lambda Society of Hippocrates, and treasurer 

 of the American Medical Association for one 

 year. During the war he was an active mem- 

 ber of the Sanitary Commission. 



Aside from these numerous positions of trust 

 and responsibility directly connected with his 

 profession, Dr. Wood held many others of a 

 purely philanthropic or literary character in- 

 volving much labor, which he cheerfully under- 

 took for the benefit of others. He was for 

 twenty- six years a member of the Board of the 

 American Bible Society, and during twenty- 

 three years of the time on two of its most 

 important committees. He was for many years 

 also an inspector of the public schools, and 

 performed the arduous duties of that position 

 with great fidelity. He was also an active 

 member of both the Historical and Geographi- 

 cal Societies. He wrote little, and was averse 

 to any thing like display. His modesty, his 

 quiet and practical piety, profound medical 

 learning, and great ability as an organizer, to- 

 gether with his gentle and courteous manners, 

 made his loss one which will be deeply felt by 

 the profession and the public. 



WORKS, PUBLIC. An English writer ob- 

 serves that "it is hardly more than thirty years 

 since the prospectus of the London and Bir- 

 mingham Railway Company, with the estimate 

 of the rest of their proposed undertaking, at 

 1,800,000, took not only the general public 

 but even Lombard Street by surprise. Yet with 

 the example of success afforded by the Liver- 

 pool and Manchester Railway, capital was soon 

 found, not only for the London and Birming- 

 ham, but for still more costly lines ; and that, 

 notwithstanding the estimate just referred to 

 proved to have been but about one-third of the 

 ultimate outlay, since that time nearly 500,- 

 000,000 of money have been found for Eng- 

 lish railways alone. If the capital available 

 for engineering undertakings has increased, 

 within the last thirty or thirty-five years, lit- 

 erally from millions to hundreds of millions, 

 what may we not expect within the next thir- 

 ty or forty years? " At this time it would be 

 impossible, within any moderate limits, to 

 enumerate even the public works under- 

 taken and in progress, which forty years ago 

 would have been considered chimerical and 

 impossible both in an engineering and finan- 

 cial point of view. The three public works 

 which-now most especially claim public atten- 

 tion are the Suez Canal, the Pacific Railroad, 

 and the Mont Cenis Tunnel. Of the first, a de- 

 scription will be found under its distinctive 

 head. But attention is to be called, in an en- 

 gineering point of view, to the rapidity with . 



