It should be noted, too, that Clarissa's medical satchel and books, along with other family artifcats were donated in 1992 to the Missouri Historical Society by myself and my mother, M. Jeanette Lane. They are archived in the Thomas Anderson Moore Collection. -pdp

Note: Besides Homeopathic Medicine, this page also includes a sketch on Dentistry.

Also of interest on this site: Old Medical Terms and their Definitions

The earliest physicians in St. Louis were the army surgeons stationed at the miLitary posts under the French and Spanish regimes, who in many instances settled in the community and identified themselves with its interests and life. As they were usually men of superior education and good position, they established a standard of medical practice which has ever since been maintained, and laid the foundation of a code of medical ethics which has caused the profession in St. Louis to occupy a respected position in the medical world.

The first physician whose name appears in the early archives was Dr. Andre Auguste Condé, a native of Aunis, France, who was post-surgeon in the French service at Fort Chartres, prior to the session to England, and crossed the river with the few soldiers brought over by Captain St. Ange de Bellerive, October 20, 1765 Dr. Condé received from Governor St. Ange, June 2, 1776, a concession of two lots in the village, fronting on Second Street, and being the east half of the block next south of the Catholic church block. On this lot he built, for his residence, a house of upright posts, in which he resided until his death, November 28,1776.

Dr. Jean Baptiste Valleau was the second physician who settled in St. Louis. He was a native of France, in the Spanish service, and came to St. Louis late in the year 1767 as surgeon of the company sent up by Count Ulloa from New Orleans under the command of Captain Rios to take possession of St. Louis. Dr. Valleau practiced here until his death, in 1768, and this will is the first on record in St. Louis.

Dr. Antoine Reynal was the third physician to practice at the early trading post called St. Louis, his residence and professional career beginning in 1776. He subsequently removed to St. Charles, where he died. Dr. Bernard Gibkins was the next in chronological order to begin the practice of his profession at this place, but little more is known df him than that he was here during the years 1779 and 1780.

Dr. Antoine Francois Saugrain, who was born at Versailles, France, February 17, 1763, came to St. Louis from Gallipolis, Ohio, in the year 1800. Here he continued in the practice of his profession until his death, May 20, 1820, at the age of fifty-seven years. He was a highly educated man, a polished gentleman and a successful practitioner of the old school. He was one of the earliest advocates of vaccination, and in the summer of 1809 announced in the "Missouri Gazette" that he had been favored by a friend with the genuine vaccine infection and had successfully communicated that inestimable preventive of smallpox to a number of the inhabitants of St. Louis and its vicinity, and that he would, with much pleasure, on application, furnish physicians and other intelligent persons residing beyond the limits of his accustomed practice with the vaccine infection.

Dr. Bernard Gaines Farrar began practice in St.. Louis in 1809, and within a few years thereafter became the most conspicuous of the early practitioners, obtaining very considerable distinction as a surgeon. One of his first operations was an amputation off the the thigh, performed on a young man by the. name of Shannon, who afterward became a distinguished Kentucky jurist. In 1807 Shannon undertook an expedition, under the auspices of the general government, to ascertain the source of the Missouri River. At a point eighteen hundred miles up that river he was attacked by the Black Feet Indians and received a gunshot wound in the knee. He was brought down to St.. Louis and successfully operated on by Dr. Farrar. The operation was one which it was then thought gave evidence of great surgical skill, in view of the distance which the patient had traveled and the low state to which his vitality had been reduced by the accident. Dr. Farrar made the recto-vesical section for the removal of a calculus which had become attached to the fundus of the bladder, several years earlier than Sansom, who is recognized as having the prior claim, by virtue of having been the first to publish such a case. In the War of 1812 Dr. Farrar served as a surgeon and also as a soldier in defending the State against the depredations of the Indians. His reputation became widely extended and he was offered a professorship in the medical department of Transylvania University, which was then the only medical school west of the Alleghany Mountains. He was a member of the first Territorial Legislature of Missouri, and was very active and influential in the affairs of the community. He died of cholera, July 1, 1849.

Other early physicians of St. Louis were Dr. William Reynolds, who lived in Cahokia, but practiced also on this side of the river & for some years, beginning in 1810; Dr. Wilkinson, who. arrived here in 181 I; Dr. J. M. Read, who came west from Baltimore, Maryland; and Drs. Walker, Simpson and Quarles. Dr. Simpson served as a surgeon in the United states army previous to his coming to St. Louis. In company with Dr. Quarles he established the first drug store in St. Louis, and subsequently he served as postmaster, collector and sheriff of St. Louis County. He lived to be nearly eighty-eight years of age, and died here, in 1872. Many of the earliest practitioners of medicine in St. Louis were not only men of superior professional attainments, but accomplished men of affairs, and not a few of them achieved local distinction in public life. Dr. Samuel Merry came here at an early date, after graduating from the University of Pennsylvania; was appointed receiver of public moneys in 1833, and held that office for twelve years. Dr. Clayton Tiffin, who was a brother of Edward Tiffin, first Governor of Ohio, was a surgeon in the War of 1812; settled in St. Louis after the war, built up here the largest practice of any physician of his day, and became wealthy. He is said to have performed the first Caesarean Operation in the Mississippi Valley. Dr. Herman Laidley Hoffman, who came to St. Louis from New York in the autumn of 1819, was one of the founders of the old Phoenix Fire Insurance Company. Dr. William Carr Lane, who came to St. Louis in 1819 was the first mayor of the city, and was elected, in all, nine times to that office. His cousin, Dr. Hardage Lane, who was less conspicuous in political circles, practiced in St. Louis for more than a quarter of a century, and was a remarkably successful physician.

Dentistry, that branch of the healing art which treats diseases and lesions on the human teeth and their replacement by substitution when lost. It is very ancient, for traces of it have been discovered in Egyptian tombs. In some of these tombs artificial teeth have been found, ivory and wood mounted on gold plates, and a few of the mummies have teeth plugged with gold and white cement. Similar traces of dentistry have been taken also from Etruscan tombs, showing that it was practiced in that civilization in Italy, which preceded the Roman. Among civilized peoples beautiful teeth are held in high esteem, and one part of the dentist’s art is to make them even and regular and white and preserve them from decay. Savage, on the other hand, set little value on their teeth and subject them to the destructive treatment. The Abyssinians and other African tribes file their teeth into saw points, to increase their fierceness of appearance, and the Malays are addicted to the same practice. In China and Japan young women stain their teeth black to add to their beauty. The modern art of dentistry dates from the eighteenth century, when the treatment of the teeth began to receive unusual attention. It was not until the latter part of that century that it showed any progress in the United States, but from that time on Americans devoted to it a patient study, zeal and interest which have placed them at the head of the profession in the world.

The first dentist in the United Sates of whom there is any account was La Maire, who came over with the French troops sent to assist our forefathers in the Revolutionary War. Next after him was an Englishman - Whitlock. The first native American dentist was John Greenwood, who practiced in New York City, and who, in 1790, constructed entire dentures for George Washington. They were carved from ivory and held in place by spiral springs. As late as 1820 there were only one hundred dentists in the United States, but in 1892 the number had grown to eighteen thousand. The art has made great advances in the last fifty years in its healing and saving, as well as its mechanical features, and has reached a point in which the practice is subdivided into specialties, the extraction of teeth, the manufacture of plates, the treatment of pulps and the filling of cavities, and crown and bridge work being generally performed, each by a different person in the same establishment. Great ingenuity has been exhibited in the methods and appliances for performing the mechanical work in dentistry. Down to about the year 1870 hand instruments alone were used, but these have been largely superseded by burrs and drills operated by dental engines.

The first dentist in St. Louis was Dr. Paul, who came and opened an office in 1809. The next was Dr. D.T. Evans, in 1830. In 1837 there were ten dentists in the city, one of whom was Dr. Isaiah Forbes, but in 1838 all were gone but three, Dr. Forbes, Dr. Edward Hale and Dr. B.B. Brown, who all became eminent in the profession and successful. Dr. hale remained until the year 1864, when he went to New Jersey, and there died. Dr. Brown went to California in 1849 and never returned. Dr. Forbes remained in St. Louis all his life, taking an active interest in the cause of popular education, and being chosen for several terms a school director. In 1840 A.M. Leslie, a trained gold-beater, established a dental depot in the city, which was afterward enlarged into a dental manufactory. In 1887 Alexander Hepburn established a dental depot, and not long afterward the two establishments were consolidated into one of the largest in the West. Between 1840 and 1845 Drs. Aaron Blake, Isaac Comstock and J.B. Clark and Edgerly opened offices in the city, followed a little later by Drs. Potts, S.B. Fithian, H.J. McKellops, E.W. Spalding, H.E. Peebles, Dunham, Homer Judd, Barron and Morrison - all of whom became successful practitioners, and several of them distinguished for achievements in the profession.

Dr. Clark was one of the first dentists in the country to use rolled cylinder of gold foil, and he gained an enviable reputation also for his treatment of dead pulps to avoid inflammation. Forbes, at an early day in his practice, invented a chair which came into general use. Spalding was an early advocate of the use of cylinders in filling teeth. He was professor in the Ohio Dental College of Cincinnati.

In 1850 the St. Louis Dental Association was organized, and three years later the “Dental Review” was published, continuing as local organ of the profession until 1863. In 1865 the Missouri State Dental Association was formed, and the following year the Missouri Dental College was opened, with Dr. Isaiah Forbes for the first president; Dr. homer Judd, dean, and Dr. Frank White, secretary. In 1869 the “Dental Journal” was first published, with Dr. Judd as chief editor. The entire history of the profession in St. Louis has been marked by the presence of practitioners of unusual ability and skill and devotion to the calling. A cordial feeling has prevailed, a high professional spirit maintained, and whatever gave a promise of elevating the art to a higher plane of influence and usefulness has always received the vigorous co-operation of the dentists in the city. - D.M. Grissom

It gained a foothold in the United States, in New York city, through Dr. Hans Gram, a native of Sweden, who in 1825 published a pamphlet translation fo Hahnemann’s “Spirit of Homeopathy.” Its first representative in St. Louis, so far is known, was Dr. John T. Temple, who came here in 1844.

It is not easy to give a just or satisfactory review of the development in a single city of such a cause, new not only to the city and country, but comparatively so to the world, and to the realms both of experience and of scientific investigation.

There is no doubt, too, that homeopathy has radically modified the general practice of medicine. One stronghold after another of the old forms of bleeding, cupping, and drugging has been forced to yield, until the more simple and safe forms of the new practice have been quietly adopted. Not infrequently also some drug action is announced by the old school as newly discovered, or some remedy newly recommended as remarkably curative, which as had a recognized place in the current materia medica of homeopathy for a quarter or half a century, or from Hahnemann’s own work even, and is, curative only in accordance with the homeopathic law of drug action. For these credit is not acknowledged to homeopathic sources. The appropriation may be, and perhaps in most instances is, unconscious. However, it remains a fact to which it is perhaps pertinent to this sketch to call attention, that general medical practice in St. Louis, as elsewhere, has been greatly modified by the direct and indirect influence of homeopathy for the last half century.

During these years some homeopathic institutions have been permanently established; other have had only a temporary existence. Growth in this line, however, has been positive if not rapid or uniform. We have our pioneer institutions - the Medical College and the Good Samaritan Hospital, and in later days our expanding works in the Children’s Free Hospital, Blind girls’ Home, and our College Clinic and Dispensary, besides various other centers of work, more or less perfectly organized. The history of these institutions, and of homeopathy, will necessarily be closely interwoven with that of the men who have been the leading minds in the medical fraternity of the past years, and who have been instrumental in all that has been accomplished, with occasional aid from some broad-minded, public-spirited man, able and willing to assist a cause weak but worthy. Such a man was the late Honorable Montgomery Blair. It was largely through his assistance that a charter was obtained, in 1857, for the Homeopathic Medical College of Missouri, located here in St. Louis. Judge Blair afterward removed to Washington, and there, as Postmaster General, was a member of Lincoln’s cabinet.

By the time its first decade in St. Louis had well passed homeopathy had won for itself a position in the estimation of many intelligent and fair-minded citizens of every position and station in life, and with its faithful and able representatives in the profession the time seemed ripe for the formation of a medical college. In 1857, therefore, through the efforts of Drs. J. T. Temple, B. M,. Peterson, J. C. Morgan, now of Philadelphia, and others, assisted greatly, as we have seen, by Honorable Montgomery Blair, a charter was procured from the State Legislature for the Homeopathic Medical College of Missouri. Soon after the incorporation of the infant college homeopathy was further? enriched by the coming to St. Louis of two able homeopathic physicians, Drs. Helmuth and Franklin, and the transfer to homeopathic ranks from the old school of Dr. G. S. Walker, all of whom were destined to make themselves felt in the State and country.

At the close of the Civil War the medical profession of St. Louis was in a state of complete disorganization, so far as scientific work and medical instruction was concerned. The two medical schools which flourished before '61 had been closed, and the meetings of the St. Louis Medical Society had been suspended for several years. In the course of time work was resumed and at the end of the sixties the Medical Society was in working order, and the St. Louis medical school had nearly two hundred students. The other medical college which, before the war, had been in a prosperous condition, the Missouri Medical, was at that time, handicapped by adverse public sentiment, consequent upon the affiliation of its dean, Dr. Joseph N. McDowell, and the majority of his colleagues, with the Southern cause. Being without a home, it struggled for years under the most trying circumstances to regain the place it formerly occupied.

In medicine, as in all else, effects respond to causes, and the prolongation of human life of more than 30 per cent in the past hundred years has resulted, mainly from the great progress mad in the healing art.

Note: Several of the notable physicians mentioned in the piece of work are also included in the 1886 commencement excercise of Clarissa's as faculty, and are so noted on the following link. I've also provided a link to the commencement and Dr. Campbell's letter to Clarissa's husband in prepartion for her surgery which he performed on 19 Mar 1890.

Updated 18 Oct 2008
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