Austin Flint

January 20, 1812 (age 74)

Following a short stay in Northampton, he settled in Boston but after a few years' experience moved to Buffalo (1836) as a better field for a young and ambitious man. He was professor of medical theory and practice at Rush Medical College, Chicago, in 1844-45, and in 1845 established the Buffalo Medical Journal which he conducted for ten years. In 1847, with F. H. Hamilton and J. P. White, he founded the Buffalo Medical College. While nominally a resident of Buffalo and from 1847 to 1861 titular incumbent of the local chair of medicine, he filled the same chair in the University of Louisville, 1852-56; and in the New Orleans Medical College, 1859-61. Although his nominal residence was transferred to New York in 1859, he does not seem to have been entirely settled there until 1861. In moving to the metropolis at the age of forty-nine he defied the local tradition that success is possible only to a young man with proper local background and influence. Failure was freely predicted and active opposition encountered; and some of the juniors of Flint's rival consultants seem never to have forgiven his success. He began his metropolitan career by accepting the chair of pathology and practical medicine at Long Island College Hospital in 1861, and in the same year cooperated with others in founding Bellevue Hospital Medical College. He became the first incumbent of the chair of internal medicine in the latter institution. For the next quarter of the century he performed the functions of hospital physician, teacher, text-book author, and consultant. By 1863 he was giving special courses in physical diagnosis. He was president of the New York Academy of Medicine, 1873; delegate to the International Medical Congress at London, 1881; and president of the American Medical Association, 1883-84. But for his sudden death from apoplexy, in 1886 he would have had the distinction of reading a paper by request before the British Medical Association, and in 1887 would have been president of the International Medical Congress at Washington. His literary activity throughout his entire career was prodigious. At first he wrote chiefly for periodicals. He also wrote a few small monographs on such subjects as fevers and dysentery, and elementary works on diseases of the chest and on physical diagnosis. His earliest volume in the last-named field was published in 1856 under the title, Physical Exploration and Diagnosis of Diseases Affecting the Respiratory Organs. Numerous editions and revisions with several changes of title continued to appear until 1920. Thus the volume brought out in 1865 was known as the Compendium of Percussion and Auscultation, etc. , that of 1880 was entitled Manual of Auscultation and Percussion, while the most recent, the so-called eighth edition, appeared in 1920 as A Manual of Physical Diagnosis. His classic work, A Treatise on the Principles and Practice of Medicine, appeared in 1866. The sixth edition was published the year of his death (with the collaboration of Prof. William H. Welch, who incorporated all of the newer bacteriological teaching), and the seventh in 1894. He published some smaller text-books which were limited to single editions; Phthisis (1875), and Clinical Medicine (1879) are but examples. The list of his minor writings is a long one. He inculcated the doctrine of self-limitation of acute disease which spares the patient much useless drugging; and his receptivity to new ideas was shown in his prompt acceptance of Koch's microbian theory of the origin of tuberculosis. He contributed greatly to the knowledge of chest pathology and diagnosis, taught early in his career that "pulmonary phthisis" is in reality a form of tuberculosis, and popularized the use of the binaural stethoscope. He was a man of imposing presence and of an unusually well-balanced character. Few medical men who have made no revolutionary discoveries have been eulogized as was Flint, both in the United States and abroad.

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