William Travis Howard was an American gynecologist.
Background
Howard was born in Cumberland County, Va. , in 1821. He was the son of Rebecca Elizabeth Travis Anderson and William Alleyne Howard, an architect of note and a captain in the Virginia troops of the War of 1812; his grandfather, William, was an officer in the Revolutionary War. Descended from the Virginia Howards who established themselves in the Dominion shortly after the founding of the colony, William was related to many distinguished Virginia families through his father and on the maternal side as well.
Education
After receiving a primary education in classical schools he attended Hampden Sidney College from which he graduated. He then began the study of medicine under that renowned but eccentric genius of Prince Edward County, John Peter Mettauer, who, in 1837, had founded the school known as the Prince Edward Medical Institute, which from 1847 until it closed in 1860 was considered the medical department of Randolph Macon College. In 1842 he went to Jefferson Medical College, graduating in 1844, between sessions having served as a resident at the Baltimore City Almshouse.
Career
For more than twenty years he practised medicine and surgery in Warren County, N. C. , but the unsettled conditions of the South after the Civil War led him to move to Baltimore in 1866, where he at once attracted many friends and participated actively in the social life of the city. He also attained a preëminent position as practitioner and professor. After a year as adjunct to the chair of physiology at the University of Maryland, he was elected to fill the newly created chair of diseases of women and children, the first chair of its kind in any medical school in the United States. In this capacity he served the university for thirty years, resigning as professor emeritus in 1897.
During his teaching days, he attracted many students from the South, particularly North Carolina and Virginia, to the university. He was a diligent and thoughtful scholar throughout life, endowed with a brilliant mind and a phenomenal memory, and he possessed a striking personality and a dominant nature. His ever kindly interest in those with whom he was associated endeared him to them and to many he became Uncle Billy. A longtime, warmly attached friend, J. Marion Sims, wrote his treatise on the treatment of gunshot wounds while visiting in Howard's home.
Although generally known as a gynecologist, Howard continued the practice of general medicine in which field he had originally attained distinction. His wide knowledge and exceptional diagnostic ability caused him to be sought after as a valued consultant. He also served for many years as consulting physician and surgeon to the Johns Hopkins Hospital and consulting physician to the Hebrew Hospital. As hospital facilities in Baltimore for the treatment of women were too restricted to serve Howard's need, after long consideration he and Henry Parke Custis Wilson founded the Hospital for the Women of Maryland, intended at the outset primarily for the indigent.
While living in North Carolina, he published a series of articles in the North Carolina Medical Journal that attracted wide attention, disproving as they did the then current theory of malarial pneumonia (February, October 1859, January, March 1860). Other contributions to medical literature were "Three Fatal Cases of Rupture of the Uterus, with Laparotomy" (Transactions of the American Gynecological Society, vol. V, 1881), and "Two Rare Cases in Abdominal Surgery" (Ibid. , vol. X, 1886), treating encysted tubercular peritonitis. Howard was married three times: to Lucy M. Davis Fitts of Virginia, to Annis L. Waddell of North Carolina, and to Rebecca N. Williams of Baltimore who survived him. After an illness of several days, following an attack of ptomaine poisoning, he died at Narragansett Pier, R. I. He was buried at Richmond, Va.
Achievements
Membership
He was a founder of the Baltimore Gynecological Society and its second president in 1886-87, a founder of the American Gynecological Society and its president in 1884, and president of the Medical and Chirurgical Faculty of Maryland in 1902.
Connections
Howard was married three times: to Mrs. Lucy M. Davis Fitts, of Warren County; to Anastasia Waddill, of Northampton County, whom he had known as a young man; and to Rebecca N. Williams, of Baltimore, who survived him.