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Frederic Shepard Dennis was an American surgeon. He was professor of surgery at Bellevue Hospital Medical School from 1883 to 1898.
Background
Frederic Shepard Dennis was born on April 17, 1850, in Newark, New Jersey. He was the sixth child and fourth son of Alfred Lewis Dennis and his first wife, Eliza (Shepard) Dennis, and a descendant of Joseph Dennis of Sussex County, New Jersey, who died in 1770. James Shepard Dennis was his brother; Alfred Lewis Pinneo Dennis, his nephew.
His father was president of the New Jersey Railroad & Transportation Company with a good social and financial position in New York.
Education
Frederic attended Winchester Institute in Winchester Center, Connecticut, where he was a classmate of William H. Welch of Norfolk, whose professional career was marked by many contacts with that of his own. Later he studied at Phillips Academy at Andover, Massachussets, and then entered Yale University where he obtained the degree of A. B. in 1872. He was graduated in medicine from Bellevue Hospital Medical School in 1874.
Career
In 1876 Dennis and his friend Welch, himself a graduate in medicine, went to Europe where they were somewhat associated in their studies in the universities of France and Germany. Dennis later went to Edinburgh where Lister was obtaining much sceptical attention for his antiseptic methods in operative surgery. Upon his return to New York he introduced the Listerian technique in a country which had scarcely heard of it. He thus became the leader of the new order in surgery in the United States.
Dennis joined the surgical staff of St. Vincent's Hospital in 1882, a position he held until his death. He was appointed professor of surgery at Bellevue Hospital Medical School in 1883, from which post he transferred to the chair of clinical surgery at Cornell University Medical School in 1898. In 1910 he was made professor emeritus. Other hospital appointments filled by Dennis were with Bellevue and the Montefiore Home in New York, St. Joseph's Hospital in Yonkers, and the Litchfield County Hospital at Winsted, Connecticut. He founded the Harlem Hospital in New York.
With a revolutionary surgical technique to expound, he had a profound influence upon the profession of his day, and it was he who persuaded Andrew Carnegie in 1884 to provide the funds for the endowment of the Carnegie Laboratory of Medical Research. The pledge was obtained in an effort on Dennis's part to keep Welch at the Bellevue Hospital Medical School when he was offered an appointment at Johns Hopkins. Welch's acceptance of the new offer caused a break in their friendship that lasted for years.
From the beginning of his medical career, Dennis was a prolific writer of journal articles. In 1892 he contributed to An American Text-book of Surgery, edited by W. W. Keen and J. W. White, which went through several editions. He later published his System of Surgery, and shortly before his death he prepared Selected Surgical Papers (1934), posthumously published, which represented in its selections the surgical epoch in which he played a major part.
Dennis's professional career was but half of his life. Far afield from these surroundings he was a gracious and popular country gentleman on his large farm at Norfolk, Connecticut. Here he raised hackney horses and worked for the cause of good roads. He left his Norfolk home to the state of Connecticut for use as a public park.
Achievements
Frederick Dennis is best remembered as a great surgeon and teacher, who did much to popularize the practice and teaching of Lister in the United States. In 1899 Dennis was made a fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons of London, reportedly the first American to be given that honor.
Dennis was a member of the Clinical Society of London, the German Congress of Surgeons, and the New York Academy of Medicine. He was also a fellow of the American College of Surgeons and of the American Surgical Association, of which latter society he was president in 1894.
Personality
Dennis was a brilliant lecturer with an impressive personality.
Interests
Dennis interested himself in forestry and landscaping. In pursuing an interest in local history he published a small volume, The Norfolk Village Green (1917), dealing in large part with the old houses of the town.
Connections
Dennis married on February 5, 1880, Fannie (Rockwell) Carhart of Brooklyn, New York, who shared his enthusiasm for country life.
