# American Medical Biographies/Physick, Philip Syng

​Physick, Philip Syng (1768–1837)
Philip Syng Physick, "Father of American Surgery," was born in Philadelphia, July 7, 1768, of Edmund and Abigail Syng Physick, daughter of a silversmith. His father was receiver-general of the Province of Pennsylvania and after the Revolution agent for the Penn estates. He intended his son to be a physician and made him one in spite of the lad's expressed objection to studying medicine. From the Friends' School, kept by Robert Proud, the local historian, he went to Pennsylvania University and graduated A. B. in 1785, studying afterwards with Dr. Adam Kuhn (q. v). He was, to quote Gross, "a faithful, scrupulous toiling soul, something of a prig and not popular with his mates but readily devouring any mental pabulum offered him, notably when, advised to read Cullen's first lines on the 'Practice of Physic' he learnt by heart all the dreary stuff." His father was determined to give the son every opportunity of learning his profession, so sent him in 1789 to London, where he was fortunate enough to live with John Hunter and to gain his esteem for his skilful dissections, and his influence to obtain the post of house-surgeon to St. George's Hospital, where he stayed a year. On leaving he was made a member of the Royal College of Surgeons.
Five testimonials as to "medical qualifications and correct deportment" were given young Physick when he left St. Georges, and Hunter offered him a partnership. Why he refused the honor of this collaboration and the opportunity of working with Astley Cooper, Abernethy, and Home, Physick, reticent always, does not state. He went instead to Edinburgh and took his M. D. there when twenty-four, in 1792.
Everything seemed to point to rapid success when the young doctor, fresh from John Hunter and Edinburgh and armed with good recommendations, landed again in Philadelphia in 1792, but perhaps for want of "push" he was some three years with scarcely any practice. A terrible epidemic of yellow fever, however, broke out in 1793, and volunteering help, he was elected physician to the fever hospital at Bush Hill, a work which would have brought him more in contact with those who could be useful to him, only he resigned the next day owing, so it is said, to his objection to serve with one Devèze, a Frenchman. But he did faithful work among the yellow-fever patients, always following his master, making careful notes and frequent autopsies and making a living by taking care of several families for a small annual sum, and in 1794, Devèze being no longer at Bush Hill, he took service there; this, with his surgeoncy at the Pennsylvania Hospital, brought him into prominence. The year 1800 saw him lecturing on surgery in the University School to certain students, lectures which Rush himself attended and applauded. During thirteen years he was professor of surgery and during that period made his great reputation. "For the first time here students heard something more than theory and a mere setting forth of operations and technic; they were taken to the root of things and made to observe, deduce and record."
In the operating-room his deftness and precision were remarkable and as a lithotomist ​he was probably without equal in skill or number of operations performed. One of his last was upon the aged Chief Justice Marshall, a remarkable case, nearly a thousand calculi, in size varying from a partridge shot to a pea were removed and the patient made a good recovery.
Dr. Physick was one of the first in this country to employ the stomach tube for washing out the stomach, an invention of Dr. Alexander Monro of Edinburgh in 1797. Physick reported cases in the Eclectic Repertory and Analytical Review in October, 1812. In orthopedic surgery his facility and inventive mechanism brought him wide fame, and his treatment of coxalgia is well known and most of the appliances today are modifications of his methods. His modification of Desault's splint for fractured thigh is still in use and his appliance for outward displacement of the foot in "Pott's fracture" seems to have anticipated that of Dupuytren. Like Hunter his surgery was conservative—a conservatism often carried to excess. As to general practice he went by the light of experience of common sense and was intolerant in his practice and teaching of the theories of others. He had great faith in venesection and Dr. Charles D. Meigs tells of a patient of his for whom he consulted Physick. She had a violent attack of conjunctivitis; great pain and threatened destruction of the eye. "She was duly bled, today, tomorrow, the next and next morning, and so on until at last she fainted so badly that terror laid hold on us both and we fled for succor to Dr. Physick. He came the next day at ten o'clock, looked at the eye and asked 'Who is your bleeder? Send for him and tell him to take twelve ounces of blood from the arm and request him to meet you in the morning and repeat the operation if necessary.' Although I was horrified I complied with the request and the next day on looking into the eye could discover only the faintest trace of inflammation. In fact, the woman was virtually cured."
He was not a great reader even on his own subject. A bound volume of Physick's lectures as delivered by him in 1808–09, annotated in his own handwriting, was presented to the University of Pennsylvania by Dr. John Welsh Croskey. His lectures, often written at four o'clock in the morning, were as carefully written as if for publication, he deeming it wrong to trust to memory and to instruct others upon subjects he did not clearly understand. One of his biographers, S. D. Gross, describes him as a cold, dyspeptic, pessimistic, unsociable man, but full of sympathy for suffering humanity; strikingly erect and handsome but pallid, his face as if chiselled out of marble, the eyes black and his hair powdered and worn in a queue. Fond of money but never claiming high fees, he yet left nothing of his large fortune to the advancement of medicine. His mind was much troubled on theological matters but what conclusions he came to in the end his reserved nature did not allow him to disclose. He died in Philadelphia, December 15, 1837.
In 1800 he married Elizabeth Emlen of Philadelphia, daughter of an eminent minister of the Society of Friends, and they had four children. Physick was "a faithful domestic character," allowing his daughters to entertain as much as they liked and only allowing himself recreation towards the end of his life when he loved to go with them to his summer house in Cecil County Maryland.
He was professor of surgery, Pennsylvania University, 1805–19; professor of anatomy, 1819–31; president of Philadelphia Medical Society, 1824; emeritus professor of anatomy and surgery, Pennsylvania University, 1831– 37; member of the Academy of Medicine of France, 1825; honorary fellow, Royal Medical and Chirurgical Society, London, 1856.