Background
Richard Halsted Ward was born on June 17, 1837 at Bloomfield, N. J. , the son of Israel Currie and Almeda (Hanks) Ward.
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Richard Halsted Ward
Edit ProfileEducation
He was educated at Bloomfield Academy and Williams College, Williamstown, Massachussets, and received from the latter institution the degree of A. B. in 1858 and A. M. in 1861. He was graduated in medicine from the College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York in 1862.
Career
He was commissioned an acting assistant-surgeon of volunteers in the Union Army and assigned to duty in a military hospital at Nashville, Tenn. , but he was soon compelled to resign on account of illness. He spent a year in Minnesota regaining his health and in 1863 settled in Troy, N. Y. , where he spent the remainder of his busy and useful life. He early associated himself with Dr. Thomas W. Blatchford in the practice of medicine and in the management of the Marshall Infirmary and Sanitarium with its attached hospital for the insane. In this institution he was attending physician, member of the board of governors, and chairman of the medical board. He was appointed instructor in botany at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1867 and promoted in 1869 to professor of botany and lecturer in histology and microscopy, continuing these teaching positions until his retirement in 1892. In the midst of a busy career in medical practice and teaching he found opportunity for extensive research in microscopy, with particular reference to its practical application in medicine and natural sciences. He collaborated in experimentation with the early American manufacturers of microscopes and influenced materially the type and mechanism of these instruments. He perfected a number of accessories for the microscope, notably an iris illuminator for the binocular instrument. He was one of the first to demonstrate by the microscope the difference in cellular structure of blood from various animals. His research in blood structure and in the microscopical study of handwriting caused his services to be widely employed in legal cases involving murder and forgery. He was also a widely known authority upon the question of purity of water supplies and upon adulteration of foods and medicines. From 1871 to 1883 he was in charge of the section on microscopy in The American Naturalist, of Salem, Massachussets, one of the first departments of any American journal to be devoted to this branch of knowledge. He collaborated with the Rev. Alpheus B. Hervey in the American edition of The Microscope in Botany (1885), by Wilhelm J. Behrens. In 1889 he published a volume on Plant Organization, with a second edition the following year. He contributed numerous articles on topics relating to botany and microscopy to technical journals. In addition to his medical society affiliations he was a member and first president (1879) of the American Society of Microscopists (later the American Microscopical Society), a member of the Boston Society of Natural History, a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, of the Royal Microscopical Society of London, and of the Belgian Microscopical Society. He was a delegate to the International Medical Congress at Berlin in 1890, and represented the United States at the International Exposition of Microscopy at Antwerp in 1891.
Achievements
Connections
He was married, June 10, 1862, to Charlotte Allen Baldwin, of Bloomfield, N. J. They had four children.
