Background
John Conrad Otto was born on March 15, 1774, in New Jersey, the son of Dr. Bodo and Catherina (Schweighauser) Otto and the grandson of Bodo Otto. His mother was the daughter of a Swiss immigrant.
John Conrad Otto was born on March 15, 1774, in New Jersey, the son of Dr. Bodo and Catherina (Schweighauser) Otto and the grandson of Bodo Otto. His mother was the daughter of a Swiss immigrant.
Young Otto was sent to the College of New Jersey (later Princeton) and graduated in 1792 at the age of eighteen. He entered the office of Benjamin Rush the next spring and became Rush's favorite pupil and close friend until the latter's death. In 1796 he was graduated from the University of Pennsylvania; his graduation thesis was a study on epilepsy.
Settling as a practitioner in Philadelphia, John quickly had opportunity to study yellow fever, which appeared in epidemic proportions in 1797, 1798, 1799, 1802, 1803 and 1805. In the second of these epidemics, Otto was himself attacked. In the same year, 1798, he was elected a physician to the Philadelphia Dispensary, a position that he held for five years. He was also for many years physician both to the Orphan Asylum and the Magdalen Asylum. Otto's most important contribution to medical science was his original description of hemophilia in the Medical Repository under the title "An Account of an Hemorrhagic Disposition Existing in certain Families. "
Although isolated and incomplete accounts of this hereditary disease can be found in the literature since the time of the Talmud, Otto's may fairly be considered the first adequate description, so that the attention of the medical world was fixed upon it as a recognized clinical entity. He noted the essential feature of transmission in one family (Smith-Sheppard) over a period of at least seventy or eighty years, also "that the males only are subject, " and "although the females are exempt, they are still capable of transmitting it to their male children. " Two years later Otto published another paper on the same subject, giving the history of a Maryland family, and in 1808 his original paper was reprinted in the London Medical and Physical Journal (1808). Soon confirmed by other American observers, the work was recognized and expanded in Germany by Nasse and Schoenlein. It was one of the most notable contributions made by an American to medical science up to that time.
When Benjamin Rush died in 1813, Otto was chosen to succeed him as a physician to the Pennsylvania Hospital and served for twenty-two years. On his resignation in 1834 a special resolution acknowledged his "long, faithful and useful" labors, and it is probable that Otto's own generation attached more importance to his bedside labors and lectures than it did to his description of hemophilia.
To meet the expected cholera epidemic in 1832 a committee of twelve leading physicians was appointed to take measures necessary to cope with the situation. Otto was unanimously selected chairman of the body. This was the western extension of the first great modern cholera epidemic. In Philadelphia alone during July and August 1832 there were 2, 240 cases with 750 deaths. After the epidemic, the city of Philadelphia presented a handsome silver pitcher to Otto in recognition of his services.
Elected a member of the College of Physicians in March 1819, he held various offices in that body, being censor for many years and vice-president for the last four years of his life. Some at least of his papers were read before that body, including an article on "Congenital Incontinence of Urine, " which though done in 1830, fourteen years before his death, seems to be the last medical article that he wrote. He died in his seventy-first year, of "extensive organic disease of the heart, " though he had for years been a sufferer from frequent attacks of severe "generalgout. " He was interred in the newly opened Woodlands cemetery in West Philadelphia.
John Otto was a member of the College of Physicians and the American Philosophical Society.
In 1802 John Otto married Eliza Todd. They had nine children, one of whom was William Todd Otto.