# American Medical Biographies/Bell, Luther Vose

​Bell, Luther Vose (1806–1862)
An alienist and army surgeon, he was born at Francestown, N. H., December 20, 1806, a son of Samuel Bell, who filled the offices of chief justice of New Hampshire, governor, and United States senator; also he was a. descendant of Scotch-Irish stock who settled the town of Londonderry, N. H.
Luther V. Bell was a great citizen in his generation. He practised extensively as physician and surgeon in New Hampshire, becoming a pioneer in introducing a better era for the insane, as well as establishing a better jurisprudence for their care and treatment in New England. He stood on a pedestal in the community in a day of great men.
When twelve years of age he entered ​Bowdoin College and graduated in 1823, receiving his medical degree at Dartmouth College in 1826 and afterwards pursuing his medical studies in Europe. The degree of LL. D. was conferred upon him by Kings College, Nova Scotia, in 1844, and by Amherst College in 1855. His middle name Vose was arbitrarily acquired. He started life without even the letter V, which stood for nothing and first appeared in his name when he was at Bowdoin. The name Vose was assumed after he went to Dartmouth.
He first practised in the towns of Brunswick and Derry, New Hampshire, and in 1834 gained the Boylston prize medal for a dissertation on "The Dietetic Regimen best fitted for the Inhabitants of New England," and in the following year published an essay on the "External Exploration of Diseases" ("Library of Practical Medicine," vol. ix). He subsequently issued a small volume entitled "An Attempt to Investigate some Obscure and Undecided Doctrines in Relation to Small-pox and Varioliform Diseases."
About this time, influenced by the success that had attended the establishment of the State Lunatic Hospital at Worcester, Massachusetts, he sought to ameliorate the condition of the insane in New Hampshire, and to that end entered political life as a member of the general court, placing himself at the head of a propaganda which led eventually to the establishment of the New Hampshire Asylum for the Insane. While attending his second session of the Legislature and still pressing that object, he was appointed, late in 1836, physician and superintendent of the McLean Asylum for the Insane, at Somerville, near Boston. In 1845, yielding to the solicitation of the trustees of the Butler Hospital for the Insane at Providence, Rhode Island, an institution then in contemplation, the trustees of the Asylum gave him leave of absence to visit hospitals and asylums in Europe that he might devise a plan which should embody the best-known construction of that period. The Butler Hospital stands to-day as a monument to his taste and judgment. He was especially interested in ventilation of institutions and houses and in everything relating to public health.
He was one of the founders, in 1844, of the Association of Medical Superintendents of American Institutions for the Insane, now the American Medico-Psychological Association. At a meeting of this Association held in May, 1849, he read a paper "On a form of disease resembling some advanced stages of mania and fever, but so contradistinguished from any ordinarily observed or described combination of symptoms as to render it probable that it may be an overlooked and hitherto unrecorded malady." This is the malady to which his own name has been given as "Bell's Disease," which others have called typhomania, and upon his description and study of which much of his fame as an alienist rests.
He was frequently called in the courts as an expert in insanity. In 1850 he became a member of the Executive Council of Governor Briggs, serving for one year. While acting in this capacity he passed upon the famous case of Professor Webster (q.v.) of Harvard University, who was executed for the murder of Dr. George Parkman.
He experimented with the electric telegraph and it is claimed by Mr. Columbus Taylor that he was the first person to pass a communication over the wire. He was also interested in an invention for the manufacture of flax; he made a waterproof camp bed by sewing two rubber sheets together with blankets between them, "leaving one end open like a great bag, so that the sleeper could enter and repose dry and warm however damp the ground or atmosphere might be."
In 1856 he resigned the superintendency of the McLean Asylum on account of ill health, to retire to private life in Charlestown, Massachusetts; from 1857 to 1859 he served as president of the Massachusetts Medical Society; at the outbreak of the Civil War he enlisted as surgeon of the Eleventh Regiment of Massachusetts Volunteers, and went south. He was made acting brigade surgeon, August 1861, under Hooker, who became a close friend. Later Bell was medical director of the division of over twenty-two medical officers and fifteen thousand men on the Potomac.
He died suddenly in camp at Budd's Ferry, Maryland, from pulmonary disease, February 11, 1862. His first slight hemorrhage occurred in 1855. Less than a month before his death he wrote to a friend: "'Sudley Church,' with its hundred wounded victims, will form a picture in my sick dreams so long as I live. I never have spent one night out of camp since I came into it, and a bed and myself have been practically strangers these seven months. Yet I never have had one beginning of a regret at my decision to devote what may be left of life and ability to the great cause. I have, as you know, four young motherless children. Painful as it is to leave such a charge, even in the worthiest hands, I have forced myself into reconciliation by the reflection that the great issue under the stern ​arbitrament of arms is, whether or not our children are to have a country. My own health and strength have amazed me. I have recalled a hundred times your remark that 'a man's lungs were the strongest part of him.' It has so proved with me. Had I another page, I should run on with a narrative of my exploits on horseback, excursions, reviews, etc., which sometimes make me question whether, in the language of our 'spiritualistic' friends, I have not left the form; and certainly I have entered on another sphere."
It has been said of Luther Vose Bell that nature was lavish to him in physical as well as in mental gifts. He was much above the common stature, and the grace of his carriage was perhaps heightened by a certain negligence in his dress.