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Manual of the principles and practice of operative surgery
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Stephen Smithwas an American surgeon and pioneer in public health. He also assisted in planning the Roosevelt Hospital, New York City, and the Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore.
Background
Stephen was born on February 19, 1823on a farm near Skaneateles, Onondaga County, New York, United States, the son of Chloe (Benson) and Lewis Smith, and a descendant of John Smith, of Oxfordshire, England, who settled in Milford, Connecticut, in the seventeenth century. Stephen, a delicate child, was forced to undergo long hours of arduous toil on the farm.
Education
With his brother, Job Lewis Smith, he attended the village school and later the academy at Homer in Cortland County. He then took his first course of lectures in the Geneva Medical College, his second course at the Buffalo Medical College. In 1850 he went to New York City to study at the College of Physicians and Surgeons where he was graduated with the M. D. degree in 1851.
Career
Smith established residence as a medical student in the hospital of the Sisters of Charity in Buffalo, New York. He was selected from ten other candidates to be interne at Bellevue Hospital in New York. While there, he wrote his first medical paper, "A Contribution to the Statistics of Rupture of the Urinary Bladder, " for the New York Journal of Medicine, May 1851. This made such a reputation for him that he was elected to the surgical society of Paris and in 1853 was made joint editor, and later editor, of the periodical in which his paper was published. He remained a member of the surgical staff at Bellevue until 1911.
One of his early operations was the second Syme's amputation of the foot ever done in the United States. A great advance in modern conservative surgery was effected by his amputation at the knee-joint. His Hand-book of Surgical Operations, published in 1862, was invaluable to Civil War surgeons, and his Manual of the Principles and Practice of Operative Surgery (1879, revised in 1887) was used as a standard text-book.
He was commissioner of the new Board of Health, 1868-75; in 1868, through his efforts, the Bureau of Vaccination was formed; he became the first president of the American Public Health Association, 1871; he was instrumental in founding training schools for nurses; he drafted bills for a national board of health and a state board of health in 1878 and 1880; he was state commissioner in lunacy, 1882-88; he was sent by President Cleveland as one of the three delegates to the ninth International Sanitary Conference in Paris in 1894. He was one of the first to propose organization of the Bellevue Hospital Medical College where he taught both anatomy and surgery.
Although the later years of his life were not spent in such active service, he was vice-president of the State Board of Charities from 1903 to 1913, and was a faithful and influential member of the Board until 1918. He was president of the thirteenth New York State Conference of Charities and Corrections in 1912.
From 1918 until his death he lived in quiet retirement, occasionally giving public lectures. In the spare moments of his busy life, Smith found time to contribute numerous articles to medical literature. Among these should be mentioned the monographs, "The Evolution of American Surgery, " in J. D. Bryant and A. H. Buck's American Practice of Surgery, and his "History of Surgery, " in T. L. Stedman's A Reference Handbook of the Medical Sciences. For thirty years he was the New York correspondent of the London Lancet.
Smith died at the home of his daughter at Montour Falls, New. York, after a short illness.
He was a conservative surgeon but not afraid of progress.
Personality
He held himself erect and square-shouldered, never seeming to lose the vitality and energy of his youth. A keen, disciplined mind and a genial sense of humor won him the esteem and admiration of his contemporaries. To the end his intellect remained unclouded and his memory bright.
Connections
He was married to Lucy E. Culver of Brooklyn, New York, on June 1, 1858. They had nine children, six daughters and three sons.