Background
Henry Hartshorne was born on March 16, 1823, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States, the son of Dr. Joseph Hartshorne and Anna Bonsall.
Henry Hartshorne was born on March 16, 1823, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States, the son of Dr. Joseph Hartshorne and Anna Bonsall.
Henry was educated at Haverford College, where he graduated in 1839. Subsequently he took his medical course at the University of Pennsylvania (M. D. 1845).
From 1846 to 1848 Henry Hartshorne was a resident physician at the Pennsylvania Hospital. He was active during an epidemic of cholera in Philadelphia in 1849 and in Columbia, Pennsylvania, in 1854, and during the Civil War he was a surgeon in the Philadelphia hospitals. After the battle of Gettysburg he attended the sick and wounded on the battlefield.
Hartshorne held an extraordinary number of positions, medical and otherwise. He was professor of the institutes of medicine at the Philadelphia College of Medicine in 1853-1854 and lecturer on natural history at the Franklin Institute in 1858. From 1859 to 1861 he was professor of the theory and practice of medicine in Pennsylvania College (later Gettysburg College), succeeding Dr. Alfred Stille who had been elected to the chair of medicine in the University of Pennsylvania. He was a physician to the Protestant Episcopal Hospital, 1860-1862, professor of hygiene at the University of Pennsylvania, 1865, and professor of diseases of children and later of physiology and hygiene at the Woman’s Medical College, 1867-1876. He also held appointments at the Philadelphia Central High School, the Pennsylvania College of Dental Surgery, Haverford College, and Girard College.
Hartshorne was a prolific writer. His fondness for literature prompted him to publish a few volumes of his poetry as well as a novel, Woman's Witchcraft (1854), published under the pseudonym Corinne L’Estrange.
For a time Hartshorne was editor of a religious journal, The Friends’ Review. The education of women interested him greatly and in 1876 he left Philadelphia to become President of Howland Collegiate School, Union Springs, New York. It proved an unsuccessful venture, however, and closed in 1878. Hartshorne returned to Philadelphia and opened a school for girls. He was a strong advocate of the right of women to study medicine. He died at Tokio and was buried there.
Henry Hartshorne is best remembered as a missionar to Japan in connection with Quaker societies, engaged in this activity since 1893. He was particularly concerned with the prevention of the opium traffic and care improvement for the insane. In medicine his most important works were his Essentials of the Principles and Practice of Medicine (1867) and A Conspectus of the Medieval Sciences (1869), both of which were translated into Japanese.
(Excerpt from A Conspectus of the Medical Sciences: Compri...)
(Originally published in 1881 The Household Cyclopedia of ...)
(This book was originally published prior to 1923, and rep...)
(This book was originally published prior to 1923, and rep...)
Hartshorne was a member of the Academy of Natural Sciences, of the American Public Health Association, and of the American Philosophical Society.
Hartshorne seems not to have been eager to study medicine and was not enthusiastic about practice. He had sufficient means without it, and it is likely that his interest in other things diverted him from medicine.
On January 8, 1849, Hartshorne married Mary E. Brown of Philadelphia.
