Background
Samuel Henry Dickson was born on September 20, 1798 in Charleston, South Carolina, United States. Both parents were Presbyterians of Scottish descent who had emigrated from Belfast, Ireland, before the Revolution.
Samuel Henry Dickson was born on September 20, 1798 in Charleston, South Carolina, United States. Both parents were Presbyterians of Scottish descent who had emigrated from Belfast, Ireland, before the Revolution.
After study with his father, who was a schoolmaster, and with Dr. Mackay of Charleston, he entered the sophomore class at Yale at the age of thirteen, graduating (Bachelor's degree) in 1814.
He returned to his home and began the study of medicine in the office of Dr. Philip Gendron Prioleau and, under his guidance, practised during the epidemic of yellow fever in 1817. In the two succeeding winters he attended the University of Pennsylvania (Doctor of Medicine, 1819).
Dickson's practise continued at Charleston where he devoted the greater part of his time to the yellow fever sufferers in the Marine and Yellow Fever Hospitals. Though he was only twenty-one years of age, circumstances gave him entire charge of both institutions. While endeavoring to found a medical school he gave free lectures on physiology, and in 1824 a Medical College came into being as a result of the efforts of Dickson and his colleagues.
He was made professor of the institutes and practise of medicine. In 1832 he resigned, in consequence of a controversy with the medical society, and in 1833 founded the Medical College of South Carolina which became entirely successful.
He held the new chair until 1847 when he accepted a call to the professorship of the practise of medicine at the University of the City of New York. Here he remained for three years but upon urgent invitation and partly for reasons of health, he returned to his former position at Charleston.
In 1858 he accepted a call to fill the chair of practise vacated by the death of his warm personal friend, Dr. John K. Mitchell, at the Jefferson Medical College of Philadelphia, and though suffering from a lingering and painful disease, continued to lecture until within a month of his death, which occurred in Philadelphia.
Dickson was a versatile man, being not only an “attractive Medical stylist and litterateur”, but a public speaker of note. He wrote a large number of articles and monographs on medicine, also papers on philosophy, history, and current events.
Dickson founded the Medical College of South Carolina. He claimed to have been one of the first to abandon the heroic treatment of fevers in vogue at the time he began practise, and the first in this country to employ stimulants and anodynes in febrile diseases. He was one of the early writers on racial anthropometry. He delivered one of the first temperance addresses ever heard in the South and is said to have established the first temperance society, directing his attack against the use of distilled liquors, while approving of wines.
(This book was originally published prior to 1923, and rep...)
(This book was originally published prior to 1923, and rep...)
(This book was originally published prior to 1923, and rep...)
(Excerpt from Studies in Pathology and Therapeutics Tee d...)
Dickson was thrice married: first he married Elizabeth Brownlee Robertson of Charleston, who died in 1832; second, in 1834, Jane Robertson Robertson (sister of his first wife), who died in 1842; and third, in 1843, Marie Seabrook DuPre, also of Charleston, who died in 1873.
