David Hosack

David Hosack (August 31, 1769 – December 22, 1835) was a noted American physician, botanist, and educator. He remains widely known as the doctor who tended to the fatal injuries of Alexander Hamilton after his duel with Aaron Burr in July 1804, and who had similarly tended to Hamilton's son Philip after his fatal 1801 duel with George Eacker. He established several institutions including Elgin Botanic Garden and a medical school at Rutgers University.

Early life and college

Hosack was born in New York City, the first of seven children of Alexander Hossack , a merchant from Elgin in Scotland, and his wife Jane Arden. Following the end of the American Revolutionary War, Hosack was sent to New Jersey academies to further his education, first in Newark and then Hackensack. He would go on to attend Columbia College, now a branch of Columbia University, where he began as a student of art, but eventually became fascinated by medicine.

At Columbia, Hosack entered into a medical apprenticeship with Dr. Richard Bayley. While Hosack was studying at New York Hospital in April 1788, a violent crowd formed outside to protest body snatching, the practice of illicitly obtaining cadavers from graveyards for use in medical training. The rioters had gathered after a medical student taunted a group of children by waving a corpse's arm at them from a window, resulting in several days of violence that was later called the doctors' riot. While trying to protect the laboratory from a mob that broke into the hospital, Hosack was hit on the head with a heavy stone.

Soon afterward, Hosack left Columbia and transferred to Princeton (then known as the College of New Jersey). Hosack graduated from Princeton with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1789.

Medical education and early practice

In 1789, after graduating from Princeton, Hosack enrolled as a medical student under Dr. Nicholas Romayne, where he regularly visited homes for the poor and insane, as they were among the few places to offer clinical instruction. In the fall of 1790, Hosack transferred to medical school in Philadelphia, where he wrote a doctoral dissertation on cholera. He married in early 1791, and that spring he received his medical degree from the University of Pennsylvania.

In 1791, Hosack and his wife Catharine moved to Alexandria, Virginia, where he opened his first medical practice. They returned a year later to New York City.

During Hosack's first few years in medical practice, he concluded that the best practitioners had received at least some of their schooling in Europe, and convinced his father to pay his way to Britain in order to obtain such schooling. Upon arriving in the United Kingdom, Hosack matriculated at the University of Edinburgh, where he was reportedly horrified to find his knowledge of botany was sorely lacking. Well received by some of the leading scientific minds of the period, Hosack spent much of his time in their botanical gardens and lecture halls. He ultimately became one of the leading American scholars of botany.

Hosack returned to America by 1796 and established a practice in New York City. A good deal of Hosack's clinical work was as a family practitioner, including pediatric and obstetric care.

In the years that followed, Hosack gained a reputation as a confirmed family man, and for living well.

Hamilton–Burr duel

Hosack was the family doctor of Alexander Hamilton and his family, and is perhaps best known as the doctor present during Hamilton's duel with Aaron Burr in Weehawken, New Jersey on July 11, 1804. Hosack, a friend to both Hamilton and Burr, treated Hamilton after Burr fired, and accompanied him across the river to the dockside home of William Bayard Jr., where Hamilton died the next day. Hosack had also treated Hamilton's son Philip after he was fatally shot by George Eacker in a duel at the same location in 1801. At Alexander Hamilton's funeral, Hosack was one of the pallbearers.

Three years after the duel, Burr was tried and acquitted on a charge of treason for a conspiracy to form a new nation in the Louisiana Territory and Spanish Texas. Hosack loaned Burr money for passage on a ship to Europe, where Burr lived for several years in self-imposed exile to escape his creditors and the notoriety resulting from the trial.

Contributions to medicine and science

Hosack was the creator in 1801 of America's first botanical garden, the Elgin Botanic Garden, which he modeled after gardens he had seen in England.

Teaching career

One of Hosack's most distinguished students was a celebrated New York City physician, John Franklin Gray, who later became the first practitioner of homeopathy in the United States. Gray's embrace of homeopathy, a pseudoscientific discipline, resulted in the loss of Hosack's friendship.

Establishment of hospitals and schools

Lying-In Hospital of New York

In 1798, following a yellow fever epidemic, Hosack proposed opening the first lying-in hospital in New York, a maternity clinic where he could offer health care to poor pregnant women. He raised funds from subscribers, including Alexander Hamilton, to purchase a house on Cedar Street where the Lying-In Hospital opened in 1799. In 1801, the Lying-In Hospital moved into space rented from New York Hospital, but ceased operations in 1827 when New York Hospital refused to host the facility any longer. The institution continued to exist on paper as a charitable society for several decades after Hosack's death, ultimately merging in 1890 with an obstetrical dispensary that became part of New York Hospital, now NewYork–Presbyterian Hospital.

Medical colleges

Hosack and his former teacher, Dr. Nicholas Romayne, both at various times sought academic sponsorship from colleges in order to found new medical schools at those colleges. They were early proponents of the belief that medical education should be easily accessible. One of Hosack's earlier victories was the merger of the College of Physicians and Surgeons and Columbia University. He successfully pursued an alliance with Rutgers College, bringing his group of colleagues to New Brunswick, New Jersey

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