# American Medical Biographies/Bartholow, Roberts

​Bartholow, Roberts (1831–1904)
Army surgeon, physiologist, sanitary reformer, writer and physician, all these and more was Roberts Batholow, of Alsatian and English parentage. He was born in New Windsor, Maryland, November 18, 1831. His parents were sufficiently well off to let him go to the New Windsor College, Maryland, where he graduated and took his M. A., afterward earning his M. D. at the University of Maryland in 1852.
A spirit of adventure, after he had taken the rank of army surgeon, led to his going with the force sent to maintain order among the Mormons and Indians in the West, in Brigham Young's time. Four years' camping in that wild country gave him wide experience in fevers and gunshot wounds, and he had no sooner returned home than the Civil War broke out and gave him three more years of military and surgical experience. A wife and family induced him to settle down to civil practice in 1864 in Cincinnati, Ohio, and he was fortunately made professor of chemistry in the Medical College there. His predecessors had been professional chemists and the appointment of a practising physician was not welcomed. Moreover, he had strange and disturbing views about sewerage and ventilation, which disturbed the conservative Academy of Medicine, but the cholera epidemic of 1866 showed him to be the right man in the right place and as founder and editor of The Clinic he had a means of refuting hostile critics of which he took trenchant but dignified advantage.
While engrossed for twenty-two years in many medical duties, he was zealously garnering material for his big book, "Materia Medica and Therapeutics." In 1874 he published an experiment in the American Journal of the Medical Sciences, made on a dying patient to confirm or modify the conclusions drawn by Hitzig and Ferrier as to the brain being tolerant of injury, his case proving the contrary in the human subject.
When he removed to Philadelphia his widespread reputation and his duties at the Philadelphia and Jefferson hospitals did not give him the leisure he craved to write his "Practice of Medicine," but it was written and had a second edition in three months. Then he went on the staff of the Medical News (Philadelphia), his pen always busy with concise and lucid articles, particularly on medical jurisprudence. With mental powers always in order, he was ready for lecture, consultation, operation or clinic, but in 1893 he retired from college work and was made emeritus professor.
After an illness from diabetes he died at Philadelphia, on May 10, 1904, aged seventy-two.
Among his appointments were:
Professor of medical chemistry and professor of practice of medicine, Medical College of Ohio; fellow of College of Physicians of Philadelphia; honorary member of Royal Medical Society, Edinburgh, and the Society of Practice of Medicine, Paris; professor of materia medica, Jefferson Medical College.
His writings included many critical and sarcastic but fascinating articles for The Clinic, of which he was founder and editor; also books on "Spermatorrhea" and "Materia Medica and Therapeutics," 1876, the latter the result of twenty-two years' experience, his avowed aim being "to stem the tide of therapeutic nihilism;" its editions numbered eleven; its sale 60,000 copies; also "A Treatise on the Practice of Medicine" which went through five editions and was translated into Japanese, and "The Cartwright Lectures," 1881, on the "Antagonism between Medicines and between Medicines and Diseases."