Robert Alexander Kinloch

Background

Robert Alexander Kinloch was born on February 20, 1826 at Charleston, South Carolina, United States, to Dr. George Kinloch and Charlotte Granby, the former a native of Scotland and the latter of Wales.

Education

Kinloch graduated from Charleston College in 1845 and took his degree in medicine at the University of Pennsylvania in 1848. He spent two years in the hospitals of London, Edinburgh, and Paris. With this unusual preparation, he returned to his native city.

Career

About 1850 Kinloch established his medical practice in Charleston, South Carolina. The advent of the Civil War brought him into the Confederate army as a surgeon. He served at various times upon the staffs of Generals Lee, Pemberton, and Beauregard and upon medical examining boards at Norfolk, Richmond, and Charleston. Later he held the position of inspector of hospitals for South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. Following the close of the war he returned to his practice in Charleston. From the beginning of his career he was a bold and self-reliant operator with a manual dexterity and resourcefulness in emergency that soon put him in the forefront of the profession of his locality. His professional skill, combined with his attractive personality, brought him a very large general practice. His medical writings, mainly surgical case reports, were usually contributed to the Charleston Medical Journal of which he acted as editor for a short time.

His teaching career began in 1866 with his election to the chair of materia medica in the Medical College of the State of South Carolina. Three years later he was transferred to the chair of the principles and practice of surgery and finally to that of clinical surgery, which he occupied to the time of his death. He was elected dean of the faculty in 1888 and continued in that position for the remainder of his life. As professor and as dean he was always an advocate of higher standards of education for the school and was deeply disappointed with the scant success attainable.

Achievements

• Dr. Kinloch was best remembered as an operating surgeon and as the leading medical man of Charleston. He was credited with being the first American surgeon to perform a resection of the knee-joint for chronic disease and to treat fractures of the lower jaw and of other bones by wiring together the fragments. He was one of the first to open the abdomen and suture perforations of the intestines following gunshot wounds.

Membership

Kinloch was a member of the Medical Society of South Carolina and of the American Surgical Association and an associated fellow of the Philadelphia College of Physicians.

Personality

Kinloch was tall with a slight, erect figure. His portrait shows a handsome face with kindly eyes. Though rather abrupt in his manner he won the devotion of his patients and the admiration of his pupils.

Connections

Kinloch was married to Elizabeth Caldwell of Fairfield County, South Carolina, in 1856, and had four sons and four daughters. Two sons followed him in the practice of medicine.

Father:

George Kinloch

Mother:

Charlotte Granby

Spouse:

Elizabeth Caldwell