Moses John De Rosset was born on July 4, 1838 at Wilmington, North Carolina, United States. He was the son of François Rosset (1590) having been known as a medical writer. Moses was the fifth child of Dr. Armand John De Rosset (b. 1807) of that city and Eliza Jane Lord, his wife, and grandson of Dr. Armand John De Rosset (1767-1859).
At the age of sixteen he was placed in Diedrich’s Academy at Geneva, Switzerland, where he remained as a student for three years, thereafter spending a year at Cologne to acquire German.
He returned to America in 1857 and began the study of medicine with Dr. Gunning S. Bedford of New York, and graduated at the Medical Department of the University of the City of New York in 1860.
As a result of a competitive examination he was appointed a resident physician at Bellevue Hospital, New York, in the same year, and there remained until the outbreak of the Civil War, when he returned to North Carolina and was commissioned assistant surgeon in the Confederate army (1861).
He served as surgeon of Marye’s battery of artillery through General Jackson’s campaign in the Valley of Virginia.
On his promotion to surgeon (1863) he was placed in charge of General Hospital No. 4 (officers’ hospital) in Richmond and later was inspector of hospitals for the Department of Henrico.
At the close of the war he moved to Baltimore (1865), where he was soon made adjunct professor and later professor of chemistry both at the medical department of the University of Maryland and the Baltimore Dental College.
In Baltimore he became interested in diseases of the eye and ear and devoted himself thenceforth to this field.
In 1873 he returned to Wilmington, there continuing his specialty until 1878, when he removed to New York where, after three years, his brilliant career was cut short by death.
De Rosset was not only skilled in his own branch of medicine but had an extensive knowledge of general science. In addition to many papers on ophthalmology and otology and the physiology of vision and audition, he issued a translation of Bouchardat’s Annuaire entitled Annual Abstract of Therapeutics, Materia Medica, Pharmacy and Toxicology for 1867 by A. Bouchardat, but the work was a financial failure, on account, it was said, of the decline in interest in French therapeutics.
For a time he was editor of the North Carolina Medical Journal.
De Rosset was known as an independent thinker, a teacher and practitioner who accepted no theories without confirmation and demonstration.
On October 13, 1863 Rosset married Adelaide Savage Meares (b. 1839) of Wilmington, North Carolina, United States, who bore him seven children.
