Background
Franklin Henry Martin was born on July 13, 1857 on a farm at Ixonia, Jefferson County, Wisconsin. His parents, Edmond Martin and Josephine Carlin, met as children when William Martin from Lower Canada and Alexander Carlin from Pennsylvania moved with their families and took up adjacent tracts of land in the big bend of Rock River in 1849. While Franklin was still a child his young father went off to war in the Union army and news of his death in Missouri was brought back to his family in 1862. Before and after his mother's marriage in 1867 to Elon Munger, he was much under the care and influence of his maternal grandparents.
Education
He was educated in the public schools of Watertown and Oconomowoc and in Elroy Academy in Elroy, Wisconsin. He worked as farmhand, brickmaker, and janitor, and taught school. Later he became man-of-all-work for Dr. William Spaulding, of Watertown, who started him in the study of medicine. In 1877 he entered the Chicago Medical College, now the medical school of Northwestern University, where after three years of privation, hard study, and hard summer labor, he obtained his medical degree in 1880.
Career
After his graduation followed an internship in Mercy Hospital at a time when the newly developed technique of antiseptic surgery was being worked out by its brilliant surgical staff. Martin not only quickly mastered these procedures but went on to become one of the first in America to practise aseptic surgery. Early fixing upon surgical gynecology as his choice of work, he joined the staff of the South Side Dispensary in 1883. Adding to his clinical advantages he did extensive experimentation upon laboratory animals. These experiments led to his development of a practical method of transplanting the ureters into the colon, making possible the surgical removal of the urinary bladder, in which operation Martin was a pioneer. At a time when the excision of a myomatous uterus carried a high mortality rate, he devised an operation for tying off the uterine arteries to cause atrophy of the tumor growth. Martin was professor of gynecology in the Policlinic of Chicago from 1886 to 1888. In the latter year he organized, with Dr. W. F. Coleman, the Post-Graduate Medical School and Hospital of Chicago, where he proposed to bring the teaching of aseptic surgery to practitioners and to bring about a general elevation of surgical education and practice. In 1887 he was appointed gynecologist to the Woman's Hospital of Chicago, a post he held for a great many years. In 1905 he founded Surgery, Gynecology and Obstetrics and became editor-in-chief, a position he held until his death. To this he added the International Abstract of Surgery in 1913. In 1910 he organized the Clinical Congress of Surgeons of North America, later merged into the American College of Surgeons in 1913. Of this organization he was a regent, and director-general during the remainder of his life and its president in 1929. His journal was made the official organ of the College. With the enactment of the National Defense Act in 1916, President Wilson appointed an advisory commission to act with the Council of National Defense and Martin was chosen to represent the medical profession upon this commission. He was made chairman of a General Medical Board, which, with special committees, was charged with the duty of mobilizing the medical profession for the war effort. He continued his War Department service as a colonel of the Medical Corps, with three months of service in France in 1918. For this war service he was given the American Distinguished Service Medal and was made a companion of the Order of St. Michael and St. George (British) and commander of the Order of the Crown of Italy. Returned from the war, Martin devoted less of his time to professional and editorial work, and more to travel and writing. In addition to journal articles he had published Electricity in Gynecology (1890), Treatment of Fibroid Tumors of the Uterus (1897), and A Treatise on Gynecology (1903). As a result of his travels he wrote South America, from a Surgeon's Standpoint (1922) and Australia and New Zealand (1924). In another vein he wrote The Joy of Living, an Autobiography (2 vols. , 1933) and Fifty Years of Medicine and Surgery (1934). During his war service, in close association with Surgeon-Gen. William C. Gorgas, he formed a great admiration for that officer. After Gorgas's death, Martin inaugurated a movement for a suitable memorial to his career. An organization was perfected that brought about the incorporation in 1921 of the Gorgas Memorial Institute of Tropical and Preventive Medicine, with Martin as its president. In 1929 the research laboratory of the Institute was dedicated in Panama City, Panama, a building of grand proportions and character. Here the medical problems of the tropics were to be worked out with permanent financial support provided by Congressional action. Coincident with the dedication, Martin reissued a booklet entitled Major General William Crawford Gorgas, M. C. , U. S. A. (1929), originally published in 1924, containing an account of the General's life and work and of the society that had created the memorial. Martin was on the board of directors of the organization that built and presented to the College of Surgeons in 1926 the John B. Murphy Memorial, a monumental building on Chicago's North Side, to furnish an assembly hall for the college. His days occupied with the affairs of the journal and the college, he was working, in Phoenix, Ariz. , upon the program for the coming clinical congress of the society, when he was stricken with a coronary thrombosis that resulted in his death.
Personality
Martin was a highly ambitious and aggressive man, but he was never of the unscrupulous type. Physically he was tall with an erect figure, fine, clear-cut features, and, in later life, a heavy crop of white hair. He turned to the world a countenance cold and austere with a manner formal and in a measure pompous. That this was not his true self is evident from the words of many friends whose admiring esteem and loyalty could have been obtained only by sterling qualities. No doubt he had many of these. One of his associates describes him as being "shy, fearless, imaginative, idealistic, and a dreamer".
Quotes from others about the person
"Long will he be known among the great dreamers in medicine. He dreamed a dream, and the greatest surgical journal in the world was born; he dreamed again and the Clinical Congress of Surgeons of North America appeared; he dreamed yet again and the American College of Surgeons came into being".
Connections
Promptly following his arrival in Chicago in 1877, Martin associated himself with the Plymouth Church near his medical school. Here he met Isabelle Hollister, the daughter of Dr. John H. Hollister, a member of the medical school faculty. They were married on May 27, 1886. Mrs. Martin was an active partner of her husband in the ownership and management of Surgery, Gynecology and Obstetrics, and a constant adviser in the many enterprises with which his name is connected. The Martins had no children and it was agreed between them that at her death the journal and the building that housed it should become the property of the American College of Surgeons.
