102 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. L. No. 1283 



known. Five weeks were lost at IvTew Orleans 

 and the trip from Cajamarca to the Maranon 

 had to be omitted. 



Gael H. Eigenmann 

 Indiana ITniveksitt 



DR. ABRAHAM JACOBI (1830-1919) 



Dr. Abraham Jacobi, the father and founder 

 of American pediatrics, died at his summer 

 home at Bolton Landing, N". Y., on July 10, at 

 the age of eighty-nine years. 



Dr. Jacobi was born of Jewish parents in the 

 village of Hartum, Westphalia, on May 6, 

 1830. His people were not well-to-do, his edu- 

 cation was accomplished through privation and 

 struggle, but he early acquired a knowledge of 

 Latin, and, after the usual courses of instruc- 

 tion in the village school and the Gymnasium 

 at Minden, he went to the University of 

 Greifswald, in 1847, at the age of seventeen, to 

 matriculate as a student of Oriental languages. 

 Becoming interested in medicine, he turned to 

 anatomy and physiology. Following the peri- 

 patetic plan of the German student, he pro- 

 ceeded to Gottingen, where he came under 

 Frerichs and Woehler, winding up his course at 

 Bonn, where he graduated in 1851, with a 

 Latin dissertation " Cogitationes de vita rerum 

 naturalium," which has considerable philo- 

 sophic depth. In the meantime, the Eevolu- 

 tion of 1848 had broken out and run its course, 

 and in this brief drive for liberty, Jacobi, with 

 Ferdinand Freiligrath, Karl Marx, Carl Schurz 

 and others, had been a leading spirit. When 

 he went to Berlin, to take his state examina- 

 tion, he was apprehended by the Prussian au- 

 thorities, imprisoned for a year and a half in a 

 German fortress at Cologne, convicted of lese 

 majeste, and again held in detention for six 

 months at Minden. In 1853, through the 

 friendship of his jailer, he managed to escape, 

 took ship at Hamburg, and after some vicissi- 

 tudes in England and ISTew England, settled 

 down to practise at 20 Howard Street, ISTew 

 York. Here, beginning with such modest fees 

 as 25 and 50 cents for office and house visits, 

 five to ten dollars for obstetric cases, he soon 

 managed to make a living. In the first year 



of his practise, he made $973.25. During the 

 next year (1854), he invented a laryngoscope of 

 his own, which was unfortunately not ever pat- 

 ented or made public before the appearance of 

 Manuel Garcia's instrument (1855). By 1857, 

 Jacobi was lecturing on pediatrics in the. Col- 

 lege of Physicians and Surgeons of New York. 

 This was the starting point of clinical and 

 scientific pediatrics in this country. In this 

 branch of medicine, Jacobi had only one other 

 American colleague (in no sense a rival or 

 competitor), the devoted and unworldly J. 

 Lewis Smith, whose famous treatise of 1869 

 passed through eight editions. In 1860, Jacobi 

 was called to the first special chair of diseases 

 of children in the New York Medical College; 

 in 1861, Smith became clinical professor of 

 pediatrics in the Bellevue Hospital College. 

 In 1865, Jacobi took the clinical chair of his 

 subject in the medical department of the Uni- 

 versity of New York. In 1870, he became clin- 

 ical professor of pediatrics in the College of 

 Physicians and Surgeons (1870-99). Officially, 

 he taught pediatrics in New York for nearly 

 half a century, actually, all his working life. 



In 1862, Jacobi establiAed a pediatric clinic 

 in the New York Medical College Building in 

 East 13th Street, which ran for two years. In 

 this way, bedside teaching in pediatrics ante- 

 dated bedside teaching in internal medicine in 

 the United States. 



Meanwhile, Jacobi had been an active and 

 brilliant contributor to medical literature. In 

 1859, he published a volume of " Contributions 

 to Midwifery and Diseases of Women and 

 Children," with Emil Noeggerath,^ who was 

 to be Jacobi's coadjutor in founding the Amer- 

 ican Journal of Obstetrics (1862) . During 

 1859-1903, Jacobi wrote much on diphtheria, 

 and published successive treatises on diseases 

 of the larynx (1859), dentition and its derange- 

 ments (1862), infant diet (1872), diphtheria 

 (1876), intestinal diseases of infancy and child- 

 hood (1887), diseases of the thymus gland 

 (1889) and therapeutics of infancy and ehild- 



1 Author of the now well-established theory of 

 the latency of gonorrhcea in unsuspected carriers 

 (1872), which has been of great moment in the sci- 

 ence of causation of pelvic disease in women. 



