PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY OP WASHINGTON. 171 



A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH OF THE LATE DR. OTIS. 



George Alexander Otis, Surgeon and Brevet Lieutenant- 

 Colonel, United States Array, Curator of the Army Medical 

 Museum, and Editor of the Surgical volumes of the Medical and 

 Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion, died at Washington, 

 D. C, February 23, 1881, at the comparatively early age of fifty 

 years. 



Surgeon Otis was descended from a cultivated New England 

 family. His great grandfather, Ephraim Otis, was a physician who 

 practiced at Scituate, Massachusetts. His grandfather, George 

 Alexander Otis, was a well-known citizen of Boston, Massachusetts, 

 whose early years were occupied by commercial pursuits. Mr. Otis 

 was a man of education and literary tastes, who, so soon as his cir- 

 cumstances permitted, retired from business, and devoted himself 

 entirely to books. He is remembered especially on account of his 

 translation of Botta's History of the War of the Independence of 

 the United States of America, published in 1820, an undertaking 

 in which he was encouraged by James Madison and John Quincy 

 Adams, and which he accomplished so well that the book ran 

 through twelve editions. He died at an advanced age in June, 

 1863. 



The father of Surgeon Otis, also George Alexander Otis, was 

 born in 1804. He attended the preparatory course at the Boston 

 Latin School, studied and graduated at Harvard College, after 

 which he devoted himself, with much promise, to the profession of 

 law. Mr. Otis was married February 9, 1830, to Anna Maria Hick- 

 man, of Newton, Massachusetts, daughter of Harris Hickman, a 

 lawyer, born at Front Royal, Virginia, who had enjoyed an excel- 

 lent professional reputation in early life in the Shenandoah Valley, 

 and subsequently at Detroit, in the then Territory of Michigan. 

 Of this marriage the subject of our biographical sketch was the 

 only issue, Mr. Otis dymg of consumption, June 18, 1831. 



George Alexander Otis was born in Boston, Massachusetts, No- 

 vember 12, 1830. Left an infant to the tender care of his widowed 

 mother, his early years were nurtured by a devoted love, which 

 accompanied him through youth and manhood, smoothed the pillow 

 of his last illness, and followed him to the grave. 



When old enough to go to school, George was sent at first to the 

 Boston Latin School, and afterwards to the Fairfax Institute, at 

 Alexandria, Virginia, where he was prepared for college. In 1846 



