David Hosack

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Dr. David Hosack (August 31, 1769 – December 22, 1835), a noted physician, botanist, and educator, is perhaps most widely known as the doctor who attended to Alexander Hamilton after Hamilton's deadly duel with Aaron Burr. Born in New York City to parents Alexander and Jane Hosack, David was the first of their seven children. Following the end of the American Revolution, Hosack was sent to New Jersey academies to further his education, first in Newark and then Hackensack. He would go on to attend Columbia University where he began as a student of art, but eventually became fascinated by medicine. Young David would eventually enter into an apprenticeship with Dr. Richard Bayley. While studying under Bayley in early 1788 at New York Hospital, a mob formed outside of the hospital, as the illicit obtainment of cadavers from graveyards left medical teaching scandalous and disliked. After a medical student taunted the crowd by waiving the arm of one of the corpses out of a window at the mob, a riot ensued and Hosack, trying to protect the laboratory, was hit on the head with a heavy stone.

Contents 1 Continuing His Education 2 Time in England 3 Return to America 4 Hamilton-Burr Duel 5 Important Medical Contributions 6 Life as a Teacher 7 Personal Life 8 In Literature

[edit] Continuing His Education

Shortly after the mob incident Hosack transferred to the College of New Jersey, or today's Princeton University. Hosack graduated from Princeton in 1789 and quickly enrolled as a student under Dr. Nicholas Romayne, where he regularly visited homes for the poor and insane, as they were the only places to offer clinical instruction. In the fall of 1790 Hosack transferred to a medical school in Pennsylvania, where he wrote a doctoral dissertation on cholera. He received his medical degree the following spring, shortly after marrying Catharine Warner, whom he had first met at Princeton. David and Catharine moved to Alexendria, Virginia shortly after their marriage, where Dr. Hosack opened his first medical practice. Their son Alexander was born in June of 1792, shortly before the family moved back to New York City. In his few short years in the medical field, Hosack had learned that the best practitioners had received at least some of their schooling in Europe, so his father agreed to pay his way to Britain in order to obtain said schooling.

[edit] Time in England

Upon arriving in England, Hosack matriculated at the University of Edinburgh, where he was horrified to find his knowledge of botany was sorely lacking. Well-received by some of the leading scientific minds of the period, Hosack spent much of his time in their botanical gardens and lecture halls, until his knowledge of botany grew to one of the largest of all Americans.

[edit] Return to America

Shortly after his return to America, Hosack's son Alexander died. His wife Catharine died shortly after in 1796 giving birth to another child, which also died. These tragedies, along with the epidemics of yellow fever that hit Philadelphia in 1793 and New York in 1795 and 1798, led Hosack to devote much of his life hereafter towards the expansion of medical knowledge and education, as well as the training of doctors in caring for women and children. Hosack also become an advocate for the betterment of lives of the poor, which led him to become a founder of the Humane Society. Hosack also helped to found Bellevue Hospital in New York City.

[edit] Hamilton-Burr Duel

David Hosack was the doctor of Alexander Hamilton and his family, and is perhaps best known as the doctor present during Hamilton's deadly duel with Aaron Burr in Weehawken, New Jersey on July 11, 1804. Hosack treated Hamilton following his fatal wounding by Burr, just as he had treated Hamilton's son after he was fatally shot in a duel at the same location in 1801. A good deal of Hosack's practice was dedicated towards that of a family doctor, as he was more than capable or bestowing pediatric or obstetric care if need be.

[edit] Important Medical Contributions

Hosack made many important contributions to the field of medicine in his lifetime. He performed the first successful ligature of an aneurism of the femoral artery. He was also the first to introduce the operation for hydrocele by injection, was one of the first physicians to use a stethoscope, and was a strong advocate of smallpox vaccination. He also made a lot of progress towards combating yellow fever, and was the first man to make an accurate description of its symptoms. He was also the creator of America's first botanical garden, Elgin Botanical Garden, which he modeled after the ones he had seen in England. His funding was insufficient to support such a project for so long, and the state legislature eventually purchased his garden for a much lower sum than he had put into it. The garden was then given to Columbia University, which had no interest in continuing with such a costly project.

[edit] Life as a Teacher

Hosack was appointed professor of natural history at Columbia College in 1795, and in 1797 succeeded to the chair of materia medica. In 1807 he was named professor of midwifery and surgery in the College of Physicians and Surgeons, later occupying the chairs of the “Theory and Practice of Medicine” and of “Obstetrics and the Diseases of Women and Children.” He helped organize the short-lived medical department of Rutgers College in 1826, and even offered his own private medical school as a course in training.

[edit] Personal Life

Close to two years after his wife Catharine died, Hosack married again, to Mary Eddy of Philadelphia, with whom he had nine children—seven of whom survived to adulthood. A confirmed family man, Hosack gained a reputation as one who enjoyed living well. Becoming a very popular medical practitioner and professor in the years to come, ever a visionary and liberal spender willing to sacrifice his wealth to his interests, he became quite the paterfamilias.

Not surprisingly, Hosack was the founder and first president of the New York Horticultural Society, the first such organization in America. As honorary members, he brought in his old friend Sir James Edward Smith as well as John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and the Marquis de Lafayette (Robbins 1964, 174-175). He was president of the Literary Society and the Philosophical Society and one of the founders of the New-York Historical Society—and its fourth president (1820-1827).

After Mary died in 1824, he married Magdalena Coster, a widow of one of his friends and a mother with seven children of her own. The families were combined with rare success, living in a house on Chambers Street and maintaining a country estate for summer getaways on Kip’s Bay—both part of the Coster inheritance. Every Saturday, the Hosacks hosted a salon remarkable for the leading artists and intellectuals as well as other medical men who attended, and they became well-known as social leaders in the city (Robbins 1964, 166). Hosack befriended the poet William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878) and was a patron of American artists including Samuel F. B. Morse, the inventor of telegraphy, and Thomas Cole.

In later life, with his third wife’s family assets to assist in his enterprises, David Hosack was able to purchase the famous Hudson River estate of Hyde Park, former home of his old teacher and sometime partner in medical practice Dr. Samuel Bard, and he recommenced developing a fine botanical garden. The Hosack’s opulent “retreat” became a popular haunt of visitors who enjoyed the mystique of the Hudson River valley, including not only painters and naturalists but the writer Washington Irving.

[edit] In Literature

Gillen D'Arcy Wood's 2005 historical novel, Hosack's Folly, was based on the life of Dr. Hosack. Hosack's Folly takes place twenty years after the Hamilton-Burr duel, during a time of great danger in New York due to a pending yellow fever epidemic.