John Lambert Richmond was born on April 5, 1785 on a farm near Chesterfield, Massachussets, the eldest of the twelve children of Nathaniel and Susannah (Lambert) Richmond, and sixth in descent from John Richmond of Ashton Keynes, Wiltshire, who emigrated to Massachusetts and settled in Taunton about 1837. Nathaniel Richmond was a veteran of the Revolution and held several military commissions subsequently in Herkimer, New York, to which place he moved with his family in 1787.
Extreme poverty precluded any systematic schooling for the son. Hence his entire education, which came to embrace even the classical languages, was obtained at odd moments between periods of hard labor in coal mines, fields, and forests.
In 1817 he removed to Cincinnati. Here he was employed by Dr. Daniel Drake as a janitor for the Medical College of Ohio, the second institution of its kind in the Middle West. He induced Drake to accept him as a student and despite great financial difficulties received the medical diploma on April 4, 1822.
In 1816 Richmond was ordained a Baptist minister. He performed his clerical duties on Sundays and on week days continued to work as a laborer.
In 1822 he started practice in Newton, Ohio, continuing to preach on Sundays in the Cluff Road Church. It was during such a service, on April 22, 1827, that he was called to a patient on whom he performed the first successful Cæsarean operation to be reported in the medical press of the United States. The patient was a young colored woman, bearing her first child. She had been unsuccessfully in labor for thirty hours because of a deformity of the genital passages. Convulsions had set in; a heavy rain prevented the transport of the patient to a hospital or even the calling of consulting surgeons. Richmond "feeling a deep and solemn sense of responsibility, with only a case of common pocket instruments, about one o'clock at night, commenced the Cæsarean section. "
The operation was performed in a new log cabin without flooring and without chimney. The wind came through the unchinked crevices, making it necessary for assistants to hold blankets to protect the candle flame. The position of the child was so unfavorable that Richmond was compelled to sacrifice it, but he saved the life of the mother.
He published a brief preliminary report of the case in the Western Medical and Physical Journal, November 1827, and a full history in the same periodical, whose title had been changed to Western Journal of the Medical and Physical Sciences, in the issue for January-March 1830.
A cholera epidemic in Cincinnati in 1831 again proved Richmond's mettle. He was among the first to volunteer for service, contracted the disease during his labors, and, though he recovered, never again regained his health. He moved further west, to Pendleton, Indiana, and thence to Indianapolis, where he again practised and preached.
An attack of apoplexy put an end to his activity and he turned to the home of some of his children in Covington, Fountain County, Indiana, where he died.
He was a fluent and impressive speaker, and devoted to the ministry, in which he continued until as late as 1842.
On November 23, 1806, he married Lorana Sprague Patchin of Milton, New York, who bore him ten children and predeceased him by a year.
