# American Medical Biographies/Phelps, Charles

​Phelps, Charles (1834–1913)
Charles Phelps, born at Milford, Mass., December 12, 1834, was descended from William Phelps, who came to this country with his family in 1630, and settled in Connecticut, of which (then the Colony of New Haven) he was one of the first Commission of Government. Edward Holyoke, president of Harvard College, and Jonathan Walcott, of Salem, Mass., were also among his ancestors, all of whom for eight generations were of New England.
The son of a physician, after graduating from Brown University in 1855, he followed in his father's footsteps and entered the College of Physicians and Surgeons, New York, and graduated in 1858. Shortly after he entered the service of the old New York and Havre Steamship Company, and was surgeon of the Arago at the outbreak of the war in 1861, when he entered the service of the Government as a "contract surgeon." When the Merrimac sank the federal ships Cumberland and Congress and before the Monitor had been tested, the government hastily fitted out and strengthened three transports, of which Arago was one, to attempt to sink the Merrimac by ramming, and Dr. Phelps volunteered and was accepted for that service, but the Monitor arrived before the transports got into action.
Returning to New York, Phelps next had charge of the Government Hospital, in the northern part of Central Park. He was twice health officer of the port of New York.
During the war he married Isabel Marguerite, daughter of Theodore A. James, of New Orleans, and after the war settled down to practice in the City of New York, where he resided until his death, from pneumonia, on December 30, 1913.
He was always a student, and in middle age and later life wrote much on various professional subjects, devoting himself to that which might be widely useful.
Dr. Phelps was twice nominated by the Governor for the office of health officer of New York, but was not confirmed. At the time of the celebrated encounter between James Gordon Bennett and Fred May, it was generally understood that he accompanied them as surgeon when they were supposed to have fought a duel, but he would never admit it.
As visiting surgeon, Dr. Phelps was on the staff of both Bellevue and St. Vincent's Hospitals for almost thirty-five years, and it was only during the last six years of his life that he gave up his active hospital work to become a member of the consulting staff of both of these institutions.
As a member of the Board of Police Surgeons of New York City, he early became interested in the treatment of varicose veins, then, as now, an important cause of disability of members of the police force, and he devised an operation, multiple ligature (N. Y. Med. Jour., 1889) for the radical cure of this condition.
He was among the first in this country to employ the open method in the treatment of fracture of the patella (N. Y. Med. Jour., 1898), an operation he performed many times; the modern operation of suture of the patella also owes much of its success to his earlier work.
He also wrote on the relation of trauma to cancer (Annals of Surgery, 1910, p. 609). In his later years he devoted himself especially to the study of injuries of the brain following fractures of the skull and of pistol shot wounds of the head, and his book, "Traumatic Injuries of the Brain," remains today a standard work.