Hugh Talbot Patrick was born on May 11, 1860 in New Philadelphia, Tuscarawas County, Ohio, United States. He was the oldest son of Abraham Westfall and Mary West (Talbot) Patrick. His grandfather, James Patrick, had come from Belfast, Ireland, in 1817 and settled first in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and later in New Philadelphia, Ohio, where he established the Tuscarawas Chronicle, one of the first newspapers in eastern Ohio. Patrick's father, a lawyer, served as a probate judge and state senator.
Education
Hugh Talbot Patrick attended the College of Wooster in Ohio, 1878 - 1880, and was graduated with the Doctor of Medicine degree at the Bellevue Hospital Medical School, New York City, in 1884. He received the Doctor of Science degree from Northwestern University (1927).
Career
In 1885 and a half as intern at the Randall's Island Hospital in New York, Hugh Talbot Patrick began practice in Chicago in 1886. During 1891 - 1894 he took postgraduate work in nervous and mental diseases in Germany, France, and England, the beginning of a continued friendly and scholarly contact with the leaders of European neurology, especially with the eminent Eduard Brissaud in France. Patrick was in 1895 appointed to the faculty of the Medical School of Northwestern University with the rank of instructor. He became professor of nervous and mental diseases in 1902 and continued in that capacity until his retirement in 1919. He also served for many years, beginning in 1896, as professor of nervous and mental diseases at the Chicago Polyclinic.
Patrick was to a great degree responsible for the development of neurology in the Middle West. At the time when he began his practice there neurology was still included under internal medicine, and sufferers from neurological diseases were classified as freaks. Patrick built his practice, as Bernard Sachs has observed, on a solid foundation of facts; he kept his feet on the ground and "stood for painstaking scientific investigation, submitting all theoretical speculation and fanciful doctrines to the test of cold logic. " In the course of his career he wrote numerous scientific treatises, and as a clinical investigator he contributed descriptions of unusual clarity, of hysteria, traumatic neurosis, phobias, tics and chorea, brachial neuritis and sciatica, chronic progressive hemiplegia and unilateral paralysis agitans without tremor, debutant attacks of epilepsy, and a remarkable description of the pain in trifacial neuralgia. He was elected as a chevalier of the French Legion of Honor.
Hugh Talbot Patrick died in Chicago at the age of seventy-eight of carcinoma of the stomach on January 5, 1939 and was buried in Graceland Cemetery there.
Achievements
Hugh Talbot Patrick was the first editor (beginning in 1919) of the Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry, which he made a leading publication in its field. For many years he edited also the Year Book of Nervous and Mental Diseases. His published books include The Bryson Symptom in Exophthalmic Goitre (1895), Remarks on Spinal Irritation (1897), Anaesthesia of the Trunk in Locomotor Ataxia (1897), Parkinson's Disease. A Clinical Study of One Hundred and Forty-six Cases.
Membership
In 1898, Hugh Talbot Patrick was one of the founders of the Chicago Neurological Society, of which he was twice president. He was the president of the American Neurological Association (1907).
Personality
Hugh Talbot Patrick had great courage. Born with a bilateral dislocation of the hip joints, he nevertheless led an active life, becoming an ardent golfer. Though keen of mind, he was extremely simple in tastes and manner. Generally tactful, Patrick could, when the occasion warranted, deliver a rapier-like thrust with a single word or phrase.
Connections
On April 28, 1896, Hugh Talbot married Fannie Gary, daughter of Judge Joseph E. Gary of the superior court of Chicago. They had three children: Talbot, Catherine, and Elizabeth.
