Mott, Valentine, , New York 1785 1865 Male Surgeon surgeon, was born in Glen Cove, Long Island, the son of Henry and Jane (Way) Mott and a descendant of Adam Mott, an English Quaker who emigrated to America about the middle of the seventeenth century.
Here he remained until 1807, meanwhile obtaining his medical degree in 1806 from the Medical Department of Columbia College.
During these undergraduate years he became a devoted pupil of Dr. Wright Post, the professor of surgery and New York's ranking surgeon.
He was a pupil of Astley Cooper in surgery and surgical anatomy and assisted him in numerous operations, but studied also under other London surgeons and later in Edinburgh.
Returning to New York in 1809, he opened an office and within a few months began to give a private course of lectures and demonstrations on surgery in the anatomical rooms of Columbia College.
He was appointed professor of surgery here in 1811 and retained his chair when, in 1813, the Columbia medical school merged with the College of Physicians and Surgeons.
He spent the next six years abroad, visiting not only Europe but Asia and Africa as well, and on his return assisted in founding the medical department of the University of the City of New York, where he became professor of surgery and surgical anatomy.
In 1807 he went to London for post-graduate instruction.
Here he continued until 1826, when with other members of the faculty he resigned to found the short-lived Rutgers Medical College, under the leadership of David Hosack and S. L. Mitchill [qq. v. ]
.
Resigning this post in 1850 he again visited Europe, and upon his return rejoined the faculty of the College of Physicians and Surgeons.
In 1818 he was the first to tie the innominate artery with the object of preventing death from a subclavian aneurism.
Mott at once reported the case in a series of medical and surgical reports which appeared during the years 1818-20.
In 1827 he successfully tied the common iliac artery for an aneurism of the external iliac, and the patient survived (American Journal of the Medical Sciences, vol.
XIV, 1827).
During his career he performed nearly a thousand amputations, operated 150 times for stone in the bladder, and ligated forty large arteries.
So great was his reputation that when living in Europe he was summoned to operate on the Sultan of Turkey.
He wrote no major work, and it is stated that he had a repugnance to authorship, although he published some twenty-five medical papers, including eulogies on his friends Wright Post, John Revere, and John W. Francis, and supervised the publication of New Elements of Operative Surgery (3 vols. , 1847), translated by P. S. Townsend from the French of A. A. L. M. Velpeau, which he augmented with notes and observations.
On his return from his six-year so-journ in the Old World, he published Travels in Europe and the East (1842).
[S. D. Gross, Memoir of Valentine Mott (1868); A. C. Post, Eulogy on the Late Valentine Mott (1866); S. W. Francis, Memoir of Valentine Mott (1865); G. S. Bedford, in Trans.
Soc.
of the State of N. Y. , 1866; Boston Medic.
and Surgic.
Jour. , Dec. 11, 1850; Medic.
and Surgic.
and Surgic.
Jour. , Oct. 1865; Annali universali di medicina (Milano), Feb. 1868; Bull.
N. Y. Acad.
of Medicine, Aug. 1925. ]
Reporter, May 21, 28, 1864; Lancet (London), May 20, 1865; Pacific Medic.
