Henry Jacob Bigelow

Bigelow, Henry Jacob (11 Mar. 1818-30 Oct. 1890), surgeon and medical educator, was born in Boston, Massachusetts, the son of Jacob Bigelow, a physician, and Mary Scollay. After graduation from Harvard College in 1837, Bigelow studied medicine with his father, supplementing his preceptorship with attendance at medical lectures at Harvard and Dartmouth medical schools. Although Dr. James Jackson labeled Bigelow's decision to become a surgeon an immense mistake, Bigelow persisted in his choice and in 1838 was named house-surgeon at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. He interrupted his surgical training in 1840 when he developed symptoms of pulmonary disease. He then traveled to Havana, Cuba, and spent the next four years in Europe, attending medical and surgical clinics in Paris and London. He returned to Harvard to receive his medical degree in 1841.

Upon his return to Boston in 1844, Bigelow incurred the disapproval of his professional colleagues by opening, with Dr. Henry Bryant, a small dispensary and advertising the availability of free medical advice and surgical services to the poor. Despite the inauspicious beginning, he earned a reputation as a skilled surgeon and impressive teacher. An essay on methods of orthopedic surgery earned him in 1844 the prestigious Boylston Prize from the Massachusetts Medical Society. In January 1846 he was named, at age twenty-seven, visiting surgeon at the Massachusetts General Hospital and in the same year embarked on a lifelong advocacy of ether anesthesia.

On 16 October 1846 Bigelow witnessed the administration of ether to a patient of Dr. John Collins Warren, surgeon at the Massachusetts General Hospital. The successful demonstration that inhaling ether could produce insensibility to pain during surgery would revolutionize medical practice. Quick to recognize the importance of this innovation, Bigelow took active steps to ensure its adoption by physicians. He published the first paper describing "Insensibility during Surgical Operations, Produced by Inhalation," in Boston Medical and Surgical Journal (35 [1846]: 309-17), and communicated news of the discovery to European physicians. After the introduction of chloroform as an anesthetic agent in 1848, Bigelow actively lobbied the medical community in support of ether as a less dangerous anesthetic agent. Although appreciative of the great benefit of ether anesthesia in surgery, Bigelow expressed concern that the availability of such anesthetic agents might prove an irresistible temptation for unscrupulous surgeons to attempt unnecessary operations. He continued to champion a conservative approach in surgery.

A surgical innovator, Bigelow performed the first known American excision of the hip joint in 1852 and explained the pathology and treatment of hip dislocations and fractures. He made numerous modifications of surgical instruments and developed an improved instrument (lithotrite) for the crushing of bladder stones, together with a new procedure he called litholapaxy, in which crushed fragments of the bladder stones were washed out through a catheter. His method for the rapid evacuation of the debris earned him in 1882 the Argenteuil Prize from the French Academy of Medicine. In 1850 Bigelow published a notable paper describing his studies of the injuries sustained in the "American crow-bar case," subsequently known as Bigelow's case, in which railroad foreman Phineas Gage survived the passage of an iron bar through the left side of his head. Although he was an early devotee of the microscope, Bigelow remained skeptical throughout his career about Glasgow surgeon Joseph Lister's introduction of antiseptic methods in the 1860s and 1870s.

A professor of surgery at Harvard Medical School from 1849 until his retirement in 1882, Bigelow was a staunch advocate of conservative medical education. In 1870-1871 he joined his powerful colleague Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., in opposing the educational reforms proposed by the newly installed Harvard president, Charles W. Eliot, including the admission of women to the medical school and the introduction of laboratory training into medical education. Although Holmes eventually reversed his stance, Bigelow remained hostile to laboratory instruction, which he believed distracted students from the acquisition of clinical knowledge. Requiring medical students to witness or inflict pain in animals, Bigelow warned, was not only therapeutically useless but morally corrupting. "If hospital service makes young students less tender of suffering," he observed in his 1871 address to the Massachusetts Medical Society, "[then] vivisection deadens their humanity and begets indifference to it." Despite the successful introduction of animal experimentation into the medical curriculum, he continued to reject the therapeutic optimism of American physiologists, believing that medical advances would result from observations at the patient's bedside rather than the laboratory. Bigelow's views on vivisection were frequently cited in literature circulated by American opponents of animal experimentation.

Bigelow had married Susan Sturgis, the daughter of Boston jurist William Sturgis, in 1847; the couple had one son. Bigelow did not remarry after his wife's death in 1853. He died at his country home in Newton, Massachusetts.

Bibliography

The Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical Library, has one box of Bigelow's papers, which includes correspondence concerning his surgical instrument collection and appointments at Massachusetts General Hospital. Bigelow's publications include "A History of the Discovery of Modern Anaesthesia," in A Century of American Medicine, 1776-1876 (1876), pp. 75-112; Medical Education in America (1871); and Surgical Anesthesia: Addresses and Other Papers (1894). For biographical information, see, by his son, William Sturgis Bigelow, A Memoir of Henry Jacob Bigelow (1900), which includes a listing of Bigelow's publications; Oliver Wendell Holmes, "Memoir of Henry Jacob Bigelow," Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 26 (1890-1891): 339-50; William J. Mayo, "In the Time of Henry Jacob Bigelow," Journal of the American Medical Association 77 (1921): 597-603; George H. Jackson, "Henry Jacob Bigelow: Orthopedic Surgeon," Archives of Surgery 46 (1943): 666-72; M. J. V. Smith, "Henry Jacob Bigelow (1818-1890)," Urology 14 (1979): 317-22; and Stefan C. Schatski, "Dr. Henry Jacob Bigelow," American Journal of Roentgenology 163 (1994): 574. For Bigelow's opposition to experimental physiology, see John Harley Warner, The Therapeutic Perspective: Medical Practice, Knowledge, and Identity in America, 1820-1885 (1986), and Thomas S. Huddle, "Looking Backward: The 1871 Reforms at Harvard Medical School Reconsidered," Bulletin of the History of Medicine 65 (1991): 340-65. The best treatment of anesthesia during Bigelow's lifetime is Martin S. Pernick, A Calculus of Suffering: Pain, Professionalism, and Anesthesia in Nineteenth-Century America (1985).

Susan E. Lederer

Citation:

Susan E. Lederer. "Bigelow, Henry Jacob";

http://www.anb.org/articles/12/12-00075.html;

American National Biography Online Feb. 2000.

Access Date: Fri Aug 09 2013 10:33:02 GMT-0400 (Eastern Standard Time)

Copyright © 2000 American Council of Learned Societies.