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SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XXXVIII. No. 989 



est life of the labor he loved he accepted 

 grave burdens and whatever duties, official 

 or other, fell to him, apparently indifferent 

 to praise or popular reputation while he 

 dealt victoriously with tasks so various in 

 their nature that any one of them would 

 have sufficed to tax the technical compe- 

 tence of the most able man. 



John Shaw Billings was born in 

 Switzerland County, Indiana, April 12, 

 1838. From the time he went to college 

 until after the end of his medical studies 

 he was almost entirely without exterior 

 aid. He was graduated from Miami Uni- 

 versity in 1857; A.M. in 1860. His per- 

 sonal struggle for a college education and 

 the sacrificial privations by which he at- 

 tained his medical degree in 1860 from the 

 medical college of Ohio will, I trust, be 

 told in fuU elsewhere. He won his way 

 unhelped by taking charge of the dissection 

 rooms and for one entire winter, as he 

 assured me, lived on seventy-five cents a 

 week, as he believed to the serious impair- 

 ment of a constitution of singular vigor. 



Hospital service gave him what the im- 

 perfect medical teaching of that day did 

 not give and, as demonstrator of anatomy, 

 he prepared himself for surgical practise, 

 which was to find its opportunities in the 

 clinics of the battlefield. 



In the year 1861 came one of the many 

 periods for decisive choice he was to en- 

 counter as life went on. A certain career 

 as assistant to a busy surgeon was offered 

 him. His strong sense of duty to his coun- 

 try m,ade him decline the tempting oppor- 

 tunity and he entered the regular army 

 first of his class in a competitive examina- 

 tion and was commissioned assistant sur- 

 geon, U. S. A., April, 1862. 



To deal briefly with his army career, he 

 became surgeon captain in 1866, surgeon- 

 major in 1876, and colonel and deputy 



surgeon general in 1890. He was retired 

 from active service in 1895 by President 

 Cleveland at his own request and through 

 the influence of the University of Pennsyl- 

 vania, which at this time offered him the 

 place of professor of hygiene. 



During the war he was breveted major 

 and lieutenant-colonel for faithful, gallant 

 and meritorious service. Dr. Billings won 

 in the field a high reputation as a very 

 skillful and original operative surgeon, and 

 a character for courage and resourceful 

 administrative ability on many occasions, 

 but especially when after the disastrous 

 battle of Chaneellorsville he conducted the 

 retreat of the wounded and when later he 

 was actively engaged in perilous service 

 during the battle of Gettysburg. 



"While in army service he began very 

 early to exhibit his constructive talent in 

 altering or building hospitals, and his re- 

 markable power of administrative command 

 in these vast homes of the sick and wounded. 

 Without dwelling too much on this part 

 of his career, I may say that there were 

 many months of service in the field and also 

 as an acting medical inspector of the Army 

 of the Potomac. Dr. Billings 's war service 

 with the army ended when, in December, 

 1864, he was ordered to "Washington, where 

 he had charge of the invalid reserve corps, 

 of matters relating to contract surgeons and 

 a variety of other business. 



Some time in 1864 he was sent by the 

 President with others to the West Indies on 

 an errand connected with the futile plan 

 for deporting some of our recently made 

 freedmen to an island. This scheme ap- 

 pears to have failed, as might have been 

 expected, and probably the expedition in 

 which he was included was meant to bring 

 back the men previously thus deported. It 

 was a somewhat fantastic scheme and I do 

 not find any account of it in the histories 



