# American Medical Biographies/Ackley, Horace A.

​Ackley, Horace A. (1813–1859)
Horace A. Ackley, surgeon of Cleveland, Ohio, was born in Genesee County, New York, in 1813, and received his early education in the district schools. At an early age he displayed a special bent towards medicine, acquiring some preliminary instruction in the towns of Elba and Batavia in his native county and subsequently attending medical lectures in the College of Physicians and Surgeons of the Western District of the State of New York, situated at Fairfield, Herkimer County, receiving there his M. D. in 1833, at the early age of eighteen. The following year he settled in Rochester, New York, and at the request of Dr. John Delamater, who had been one of his teachers in Fairfield, delivered at Palmyra a course of lectures on human anatomy. In 1835, Dr. Ackley removed to Akron, Ohio, and in the following year was appointed demonstrator of anatomy in the Willoughby Medical College, Ohio. Soon after he removed to Toledo, where he practised for several years and married in 1837 Miss Sophia S. Howell of Willoughby. On the organization of the Cleveland Medical College in 1843 he was called to its chair of surgery, and continued to occupy this position until his resignation in 1858. During the epidemic of cholera which decimated Sandusky in 1849, on the call for medical aid by the afflicted city, Dr. Ackley abandoned his practice, organized a relief corps of physicians and proceeded at once to the seat of the epidemic.
He was president of the Ohio State Medical Society in 1852.
Though for fifteen years the most active and eminent operative surgeon of Northern Ohio, no written records of his work have been preserved. But the almost unanimous testimony is conclusive in establishing the fact that Dr. Ackley was a bold and skilful operator, who divided with Dr. R. D. Mussey of Cincinnati the vast majority of the major surgical practice of his day in the region west of the Alleghanies and north of the Ohio River.
He was gifted with a most remarkable self-possession in the presence of danger, which stood him in good service, whether holding a mob at bay, in the performance of a dangerous surgical operation, or finding a mistake of diagnosis after the conclusion of the operation. He was considered a splendid medical witness, and his assistance was sought in all cases where medical testimony would affect the verdict. Particularly was this so in cases of malpractice and medical jurisprudence. It ​was of but little use for an attorney, no matter how astute, to cross-examine him in expectation of changing or controverting his proposition.
Dr. Ackley was neither an extensive reader nor a profound pathologist, and his lectures, while clear and accurate, lacked system and connection. As a clinical lecturer he was at his best. He was an enthusiastic sportsman, and whatever time he could snatch from the demands of an engrossing surgical practice was devoted to amusement with his rod and gun. It was upon his farm and largely at his expense that the first experiments in the artificial propagation of fish were made by his partner, Dr. Garlick, in 1853.
As an operator Ackley was bold, skilful and determined. Two ovariotomies performed by him in 1855 and 1857 are recorded by Dr. J. W. Hamilton of Columbus in the Transactions of the Ohio State Medical Society for 1859, where we find, also, two letters from the eminent physician and surgeon, Dr. John Delamater, of Cleveland, discussing the merits and demerits of the operation. In one of these letters he says: "Usually Professor Ackley was accustomed to dissuade patients from submitting to any operative procedures in these cases, beyond that of mere tapping as a palliative in the later stages of the affection." The position of both Delamater and Ackley on the question of ovariotomy seems to have been practically the same.
De mortuis nil nisi bonum—yet the truth of history demands further the brief and sad statement that Dr. Ackley in his later years fell into habits of intemperance, which not only obscured the honorable records of a strenuous life, but contributed in no slight degree to his premature death, April 24, 1859.