Background
His mother was Elizabeth (Whitman) Morton.
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William James Morton
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The boy, the only child, attended the Boston Latin School and then Harvard College, graduating in 1867, the year before his father died.
After some months of teaching, he entered the Harvard Medical School in 1868, and graduated in 1872.
In 1880 he was in Paris at the Salp�tri�re, that Mecca of all neurologists of the day, attending Charcot's memorable clinics; and in the same year he was appointed professor of mental diseases in the medical department of the University of Vermont, where he gave a series of summer courses, 1880-84.
He read a paper, "On Statical Electro-Therapeutics, " before the New York Academy of Medicine, Mar. 3, 1881, which was published in the Medical Record of Apr. 2 and 9.
Career
In 1877 he was called to Europe to care for or to decide upon the medico-legal status of a psychotic patient there.
In 1878 he resumed practise in New York City.
In 1882, with C. L. Dana, he published a description of the brain of Guiteau, assassin of President Garfield (Medical Record, July 5, 1882), and in the same year became editor and publisher of the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, then the leading neuropsychiatric publication in the United States.
He continued as editor until 1885 when he was joined by Dr. B. Sachs, to whom in 1886 he turned over the entire work.
Before the American Neurological Association he read a number of papers: A Contribution to the Subject of Nerve Stretching (1882), Neuritis following Dislocation (1883), An Apparatus for Scrivener's Palsy (1883), and Treatment of Migraine (1883).
These early papers were full of promise, but his attention became more and more engrossed in his electrotherapeutic work and an ingenious and original mind was in large measure lost to neurology.
Working incessantly at his electrotherapeutics, Morton hoped great things from his many experiments.
In 1890, before the New York Neurological Society, he read a paper on "The Franklinic Interrupted Current; or My New System of Therapeutic Administration of Static Electricity" (Medical Record, Jan. 24, 1891).
His later years, like those of his father, were not happy.
In November 1912, with his associates, he was indicted, and in March 1913 convicted of using the mails to defraud, in promoting the sale of stock.
Morton and one of his friends were sentenced to a year and a day in the Atlanta penitentiary, while Freeman received a sentence of five years (New York Times, Mar. 15, 1913).
In October, however, Morton and his friend were released on parole (Ibid. , Oct. 16, 1913), and in December were pardoned by President Wilson (Ibid. , Dec. 17, 1913).
[I. A. Watson, Physicians and Surgeons of America (1896); classbooks, Class of 1867, Harvard College; C. L. Dana, in Jour.
Nervous and Mental Disease, Mar. 1921; N. Y. Medic.
Jour. , May 1, 1920; Boston Medic.
and Surgic.
Jour. , Apr. 15, 1920; Semicentennial Vol.
of the Am.
Neurological Asso. , 1875-1924 (1924); C. H. Farnam, Hist.
of the Descendants of John Whitman (1889); N. Y. Times, Apr. 4, 1920. ]
Religion
Returning to Boston, he contributed to the Bulletin of the American Geographical Society an account of his experiences which was reprinted in pamphlet form under the title South African Diamond Fields, and the Journey to the Mines (1877).
Personality
He was very enthusiastic in his experiments on cataphoresis, hoping to perfect a means of driving metallic and other remedies into the body by other than the hypodermic method now so much in vogue ("Cataphoresis, " or Electric Medicamental Diffusion as Applied in Medicine, Surgery and Dentistry, 1898); and his various publications on this subject contributed definitely to the development of the therapeutic method later known as ionization.
Connections
Morton's manner was courteous and pleasing, although to some of his colleagues he seemed shut in and reserved, as if the bitterness of his father's disappointment had left its effect upon him.
He had married Elizabeth Campbell Lee, May 20, 1880.
There were no children.
