John Green was the son of James and Elizabeth (Swett) Green. He was born on April 2, 1835, at Worcester, Massachusets. He was the third in descent from Dr. John Green who was a member of the Massachusetts General Court in 1777. Samuel Swett Green was his younger brother.
Never a robust child, John did not enter into the strenuous physical exercises of his companions, nor, on the other hand, did his pre-college years give any indication of unusual scholarship.
Endowed with an accurate and retentive memory as well as intellectual curiosity, he habitually listened to the recitations of the class above him, paying scant attention to the assigned work, and thus earned for himself an inconspicuous place as a student.
From the public schools of Worcester, he entered Harvard College at the age of sixteen. By the time he had reached his senior year, he determined not to postpone his medical studies but undertook, successfully, to complete the senior work at college concurrently with his first year of medicine, graduating with the degree of A. B. in 1855, S. B. in 1856, and A. M. in 1859.
In 1858, he had finished the requirements of the course in medicine, but because he considered the standards of the course too low, he refused to accept the degree until 1866, by which time his objections had been removed.
Having been admitted, in 1858, a fellow of the Massachusetts Medical Society, which entitled him to practice, he spent the next two years in professional study in London, Paris, Berlin, and Vienna.
In 1861, Green began the practice of medicine in Boston, filling the position of attending physician and surgeon to the Boston Dispensary.
During the Civil War, he served as acting assistant surgeon, United States army, in the Army of Tennessee, taking care of the wounded after the battle of Pittsburg Landing, and at Frederick, Maryland, after the battle of Antietam.
Through contacts he made in St. Louis during his connection with the Western Sanitary Commission, he was attracted to that city and decided to settle there to practice ophthalmology, for which he had prepared himself by a year of special study (1865) in London, Paris, and in Utrecht with Donders and Snellen.
Green taught ophthalmology first as a lecturer, from 1874 to 1886; then as a professor, from 1886 to 1889; thereafter, until 1911 as a special professor, and always - except for two years - in connection with what is now the Washington University School of Medicine.
His service in the wards of the hospitals covered a period of almost forty years.
Green died in St. Louis of pneumonia in his seventy-ninth year, active and productive to the end.
Green's greatest accomplishment was to bring ophthalmology into recognition in St. Louis as a science in itself. When he began special practice, the general surgeon was still operating for cataract. Among his contributions to the science of ophthalmology were subjective tests for astigmatism, ratios for the graduation of optotypes, a method of mounting test lenses, formulae for solutions of atropine and of atropine and cocaine, a method for treating the lacrimal duct, an improvement in orbital evisceration and one of the best and most humane of the many operations for entropion.
Vigorously, Green stressed the importance of the specialist’s trained hand for this most delicate procedure. He contended against the carelessness of the general practitioner in dealing with diseases of the eye, and with equal vigor sought to educate his patients in regard to the consequences of their own neglect.
No one can estimate how much influence Green contributed to furthering the cause not only of the medical sciences in St. Louis but of other branches of learning and the arts.
So versatile was his genius, so profound his comprehension of problems in the arts and in sciences unrelated to his own, that the impact of his mind upon the leaders in education and culture was a constant stimulus to progress in their departments.
The stress of the unremitting efforts upon a constitution not robust and the drain upon Green's nervous energy entailed by his own tireless and exacting researches were probably the chief factors in developing in him a certain brusqueness of manner.
But his sympathies were always with the poor and his professional services were rendered without charge in unnumbered instances. He had a genius for making friends and together' with his gifted wife attracted to his home the most brilliant and progressive minds of the community.
In 1868, Green was married to Harriet Louisa Jones, of Templeton, Worcester County, Massachusets.
23 December 1802 - 10 June 1874
9 November 1807 - 7 May 1901
2 March 1841 - 21 April 1926
20 February 1837 - 18 December 1918
20 April 1839 - 9 January 1870
4 August 1840 - 25 January 1926
3 December 1878 - 29 October 1965
2 August 1873 - 7 April 1949
