John Julian Chisolm was born on April 16, 1830 in Charleston, South Carolina, United States. He was the son of Robert Trail and Harriet Emily Chisolm, and a descendant of Alexander and Janet (Fraser) Chisholm of Inverness, Scotland, who came to South Carolina about 1717.
John received the degree of Doctor of Medicine at the Medical College of South Carolina (1850). He continued his studies in London and Paris.
Chisolm started his practice in Charleston in 1852 and soon demonstrated great skill as a surgeon. He conceived the idea of following the European custom of having gratuitous lectures on medical topics delivered at night for the benefit of all students and covering the school work and lectures of the previous week. The plan was successful and Chisolm was selected to deliver the lectures on surgery. From this system there developed the summer school of medicine (1853), one of the first of its kind. During this period Chisolm conducted a free hospital for slaves. In 1858 he was appointed professor of surgery at his alma mater and is said to have been the youngest professor of surgery in the United States.
At the outbreak of the Civil War he received from the Confederacy the first commission issued to a medical officer and attended the wounded at Fort Sumter. He began at once the preparation of his Manual of Military Surgery (1861) and was able to present the first copy to the surgeon-general while the battle of Bull Run was being fought. This text, based on the author’s experience in Italy in 1859, when he saw many of the wounded from Magenta and Solferino in the hospitals of Milan, became the standard of the Confederate army and appeared in several editions. He was for a time chief surgeon of the military hospital at Richmond and later directed the plant for the manufacture of medicines at Charleston until it was burned by the Union forces under Sherman during the Civil War.
After the war he returned to his professorship and was made dean (1865). He spent 1866 in Europe and in 1868 declined the chair of surgery at New Orleans. He removed to Baltimore in 1869, and within a few months a chair of eye and ear surgery was created for him at the University of Maryland. Before the end of the year he was elected dean. He retained active connection with the University until 1895 after which time he was professor emeritus.
He declined professorships at the Universities of St. Louis and Louisville.
In 1870 he organized the Baltimore Eye and Ear Institute and in 1877 the Presbyterian Eye and Ear Charity Hospital, of which he was chief surgeon. Beginning in 1873 he limited his practise to ophthalmology which he continued until 1898 despite an attack of apoplexy with aphasia in 1894.
John Julian Chisolm was among the first to use cocaine in eye surgery and his operative treatment of cataract was well known. He was one of the first users of chloroform anaesthesia. He was responsible for the foundation of the Baltimore Eye and Ear Institute and the Presbyterian Eye and Ear Charity Hospital. Chisolm was also remembered as a prolific writer of more than a hundred papers, not only of original articles but of resumes of the literature on special surgical topics to which he added his views and experiences.
(This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. T...)
Chisolm was married, first, to his cousin Mary Edings Chisolm at Charleston, February 3, 1852; and, secondly, to Elizabeth Steel, at Petersburg, Virginia, on January 14, 1894.
