Aaron Young was an American physician and botanist. He was the state botanist of Maine.
Background
Young was born on December 19, 1819 in Wiscasset, Maine, the son of Aaron and Mary (Colburn) Young. His father was for many years a surveyor of lumber and justice of the peace in Bangor. Young, always in delicate health as a child, became stone deaf as the result of an illness at about ten years of age.
Education
In spite of his handicap the boy went to Gorham Academy and attended Bowdoin College. An early interest in botany and natural history was further stimulated by Prof. Parker Cleaveland of Bowdoin. He later went to the Jefferson Medical College for one session (1842-1843) but did not graduate
Career
Young served as an assistant in Cleaveland's department during 1840 and 1841. During this period he also was secretary of the Bangor Natural History Society. Leaving college after two years, without a degree, Young went to Philadelphia, where he sought the advice of many aurists regarding his deafness.
Returning to Maine, Young tried to practise as an aurist; he gave up at the end of a year and became an apothecary in a drugstore in Bangor owned by Daniel McRuer, a prominent surgeon. While thus occupied for the next four years he kept up his studies in botany.
In 1847 he was appointed state botanist of Maine, a position which he held for two years. With George Thurber, J. K. Laski, and others, Young explored Mount Katahdin and the Castine Bay region. Reports were published by Thurber and Laski in local newspapers (reprinted in the Maine Naturalist, December 1926, June 1927). Young's account, one of the first surveys of Mount Katahdin, was printed in eight instalments in the Maine Farmer from March 16 to May 25, 1848. At the same time a flora exsiccata, in twenty volumes, was projected; only the first volume of A Flora of Maine (1848) was issued, parts of which have survived in the Gray Herbarium of Harvard College. It consists of dried plants attached to each sheet, with their identifications. The plan was given up after two years, and, when further funds were not granted by the state legislature, Young lost his position. His botanical work was sound, although his scheme of publication was visionary and expensive.
A pioneer in afforestation and with a wide interest in seaweeds, fungi, mineralogy, and mining, Young corresponded widely, particularly with the English botanists, M. J. Berkeley and W. H. Harvey. From 1850 on, he led a roving, desultory life. He practised in Auburn, Lewiston, and Portland as an ear surgeon; peddled a panacea called "Dr. Young's Catholicon"; wrote, set up, and printed three small weekly newspapers between 1852 and 1854, the Farmer and Mechanic, the Pansophist, and the Touchstone; published the Franklin Journal of Aural Surgery and Rational Medicine in Farmington, Maine (1859), chiefly important for its eulogy of Young's teacher, Parker Cleaveland; and contributed a few case reports to general medical literature. During the Civil War, a "copperhead" in politics, he used both his tongue and his pen with great freedom. With public opinion in Bangor against him, he was forced to flee for his own safety to New Brunswick. He remained out of the United States until he was rescued by Hannibal Hamlin, then senator from Maine, and sent as American consul to Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, in 1863. There he remained quietly until 1873. Some of his annual reports are of considerable value, especially that for the year 1864.
The last years of his life are obscure. He returned to Boston in 1875 to practise and became a member of the Massachusetts Medical Society. He died in Belmont, Massachusetts, in 1898.
Religion
During this period he also was secretary of the Bangor Natural History Society.
Membership
Member of the Massachusetts Medical Society