John Putnam Batchelder

Background

He was born on August 6, 1784, in Wilton, New Hampshire.

Education

He studied medicine with Dr. Fitch and Dr. Matthias Spalding of Greenfield, nearby, and in 1807 obtained a license to practise from the State Medical Society, at the subsequent meetings of which he was prominent as a speaker.

Career

He practised first in Charlestown, but soon wearied of practise in a small village and moved to Pittsfield, Massachussets, thence to Utica, and finally to New York City. During these wandering years he obtained a medical degree at Harvard, with a thesis on The Disease of the Heart Styled Aneurism. Once settled in New York, he became noted as a surgeon and was elected lecturer on anatomy and surgery at Castleton, and at the Berkshire Institute in Massachusetts.

He wrote distinguished medical papers on cholera and paralysis and surgical papers on tracheotomy and fractures. He was a first-rate operator, cutting for stone, and removing cataracts by extraction rather than by couching. He was clever as an inventor and improver of surgical instruments and his last gift to the profession was a one-handed craniotome in place of the former clumsy instruments used with two. He died in New York City at the age of eighty-three.

Achievements

• In 1825 he gained a wide reputation through ligation of the carotid and subsequent removal of an enormous sarcoma of the lower jaw. He was said to be the first American surgeon to remove the head of the femur; he performed many rhinoplastic operations, and was a specialist in facial surgery.

Connections

Father:

Archelaus Batchelor

Mother:

Betty (Putnam) Batchelor

References

• American Medical Biography: Or, Memoirs of Eminent Physicians who Have Flourished in America. To Which is Prefixed a Succinct History of Medical ... From the First Settlement of the Country