Wriinirk 
An Appmiatinti In Memoriam 
Frederick Forchheimer 
Reprint from The Lancet-Clinic and Therapeutic Digest. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 
At a conjoined meeting of the Senate of the 
University of Cincinnati, the faculty of the Medical 
Department and the staff of the Cincinnati General 
Hospital, held in the library of the hospital, the 
gathering having been called by President Dabney, 
of the University, Dr. E. W. Mitchell read the 
following memorial which was adopted: 
Frederick Forchheimer was born in Cincinnati, 
September 6, 1853. He graduated from Wood- 
ward High School in 1870, and from the New 
York College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1873. 
He then spent two years abroad in post-graduate 
study, giving special attention to pediatrics. 
He located in Cincinnati and immediately began 
a 1ife-long career as a medical teacher by becoming 
demonstrator of histology in the Medical College 
of Ohio. His was the first course given in this 
branch in Cincinnati. In 1877 he succeeded H. A. 
Clark in the chair of chemistry. In 1879 he was 
made professor of physiology and clinical lecturer 
of pediatrics. In 1900 he succeeded Jas. T. Whit- 
taker in the chair of theory and practice of medi- 
cine. He continued to hold this position after the 
merger of the Ohio and Miami Colleges into the 
Medical Department of the University of Cincin- 
nati. From 1905 to 1909 he served as dean of the 
Ohio Medical College. 
For over thirty years he served on the medical 
staff of the Good Samaritan Hospital. He was on 
the staff of the City Hospital from 1887 to 1907, 
and again from 1908 to the time of his death. 
For many years he was also on the staff of the 
Jewish Hospital. 
Beginning his medical career at the early age 
of twenty, for forty years, with unflagging zeal, 
he devoted all the energies of a strong body, a 
vigorous and fertile brain to the work of his pro- 
fession. As practitioner, as consultant, as teacher, 
as writer, he achieved unusual distinction and suc- 
cess. 
3 It can always be said with truth that he was the 
greatest of all as a practitioner. Thoroughly 
versed in the science, he applied the art of his 
calling with consummate skill, with fertility of 
resources, with a magnetic influence over his pa- 
tients, which justly gained and held the largest 
private practice in Cincinnati for a quarter of a 
century. 
How young is pediatrics as a specialty is well 
illustrated by the fact that Dr. Forchheimer was 
one of the early specialists in that department in 
this country, the first to hold a separate chair of 
pediatrics in the Middle West; a leader in develop- 
ing the specialty in America, the intimate friend 
of the leading pediatrists of the world; the con- 
sultant in that department for Cincinnati and vicin- 
ity for the past thirty years. His contributions to 
the literature of the subject are part of the history 
of American pediatrics. 
As a writer he was clear, forceful and practical. 
His contributions on pediatrics and medical sub- 
jects are too numerous to catalogue. His book, the 
"Prophylaxis and Treatment of Internal Diseases," 
which appeared in 1907, received the general ap- 
proval of the profession and a very large circula- 
tion. A second edition was published three years 
later. As editor and contributor to the work, 
"Therapeusis of Internal Diseases," which appeared 
just prior to his death, he has gained still further 
reputation as a writer. 
Medical teaching within a professional life has 
undergone a revolution and an evolution. In this 
evolution he has ever been in the forefront of the 
struggle; an ardent advocate of the highest ethical 
and scientific standards for his college, a leader in 
every progressive movement. As a teacher he was 
enthusiastic, thorough and faithful. Throughout 
his long career, notwithstanding his enormous pri- 
vate practice, he rarely missed a lecture. 
In 1912 he received the well deserved honor of 
the degree of doctor of sciences in Harvard Uni- 
versity. 
Dr. Frederick Forchheimer died June 1, 1913. 
4 FREDERICK FORCHHEIMER-AN APPRE- 
CIATION* 
OTTO JUETTNER, M.D., CINCINNATI. 
Permit me, Mr. President and Fellows of the 
American Therapeutic Society, to say a few words 
in memory and appreciation of my townsman, 
Frederick Forchheimer, a distinguished member of 
our society, whose demise occurred at a time when 
his career was full of promise to his profession, to 
his home town and, above all, to the school over 
which he presided with signal force and distinc- 
tion. That he should have been struck down in 
the fullness of his prowess seemed like a tragedy, 
an ineffably cruel dispensation of destiny. Yet the 
end was not without an element of the heroic in 
that it literally embodied the Solonic ideal of great- 
ness and happiness so beautifully exemplified by 
the wise Athenian when the latter told the story 
which reached the heart of the Asiatic despot, 
Croesus. Forchheimer had much to live for. Cin- 
cinnati, once the proud queen of Western medicine 
and now struggling to regain the laurels of the 
past, needed a master to tread in the footsteps of 
James T. Whittaker and P. S. Conner. Forch- 
heimer had begun to loom up as the exponent of 
a new era in Cincinnati, of new thought in med- 
ical practice and medical teaching in the old town 
where Western medicine was born and was reared 
by at least three generations of giants. Forch- 
heimer embodied the full maturity of latter-day 
medical science. He was a ripe product of his 
time. He was eminently fit to live; on the other 
hand in harmony with the Hellenic ideal of heroic 
dissolution, fully prepared to terminate his career 
in the very hour of his greatest strength and 
achievement. 
Forchheimer received his degree in medicine at 
the New York College of Physicians and Surgeons 
in 1873, when he was twenty years of age. After 
a few years of study in Europe, especially in 
* Read at the Fifteenth Annual Meeting of the American 
Therapeutic Society, May 29, 1914, at Albany, N. Y. 
5 Vienna, he located in his home town, Cincinnati. 
In 1876 he began his career as a medical teacher 
in the capacity of demonstrator of morbid anatomy 
and histology at the old Medical College of Ohio. 
The following year he became professor of chem- 
istry. Three years later he was made professor 
of physiology and clinical pediatrics. During his 
incumbency of the chair of physiology he pub- 
lished an excellent American edition of Hofmann 
and Utzmann's "Guide to the Examination of 
Urine." In 1900, upon the demise of the distin- 
guished James T. Whittaker, Forchheimer became 
the professor of practice. When P. S. Conner re- 
tired from active work, Forchheimer was elected 
dean of the faculty. In 1907 he gave to the pro- 
fession the results of his ripe scholarship and vast 
experience in the form of an encyclopedic text- 
book of practice under the title of "Prophylaxis 
and Treatment of Internal Diseases." It was fol- 
lowed by a still larger work prepared with the 
collaboration of many special contributors and pub- 
lished under the collective title of "Forchheimer's 
Therapeusis of Internal Diseases." This work is 
without a doubt a "monumentum acre perennius" 
to its author. 
Since 1860 Cincinnati has contributed at least a 
dozen books on internal medicine to the medical 
literature of this country. Of book-writing there 
has been no end, but not many books have achieved 
a national significance in point of value and in- 
fluence. Only three books on practice have been 
written in Cincinnati since 1860, that were epoch- 
making in their influence on the medical thought 
of the entire country. One was "A Practical 
Treatise on Phthisis Pulmonalis," by Leonidas 
Moreau Lawson. Then came Roberts Bartholow's 
classical book, and last but not least, the work on 
practice by James Magoffin French, a wonderfully 
clever and practical book. These three books rep- 
resent an achievement of no mean significance. 
To say that Forchheimer's "Prophylaxis and Treat- 
ment" is a worthy peer of the three great works 
mentioned, is but paying a just tribute to the splen- 
6 did mastery of his subject which its author pos- 
sessed in so high a degree. This work bears 
eloquent testimony to the fine sense of synthetic 
discrimination, analytical succinctness and critical 
co-ordination so characteristic of Frederick Forch- 
heimer. The honorary degree of Doctor of Philos- 
ophy, granted him by Harvard University, could 
not have been bestowed upon one more worthy. 
Forchheimer, the physician and teacher, was a 
well-balanced and well-rounded product of his day. 
But there is much more to be said about him. 
Even at the risk of disclosing to the gaze of the 
world some things which he in his characteristic 
way secreted behind the portals of his home and 
reserved for the privacy of his leisure hours, I 
venture to point out a rare and lovable psychic 
duality which Forchheimer embodied. When he 
heeded the summons 
" to join 
The innumerable caravan which moves 
To that mysterious realm where each shall take 
His chamber in the silent halls of death," 
it was not only his colleagues, his fellow-physi- 
cians and students, who gathered around his bier 
to pay homage to his genius and the worth of his 
life-work. Among those who mourned were the 
members of another profession, the devotees of 
music, the most heavenly of the arts, because 
Forchheimer was a musician, a violinist of unusual 
merit, not merely a lover of music, an amateur, but 
an artist whose talent was the marvel of the mu- 
sical fraternity in Cincinnati. Tn his early days 
in Vienna he enjoyed the friendship of Johannes 
Brahms, whose renaissance of classic art was only 
understood by few at that time. Forchheimer was 
admitted to the select circle which had gathered 
around Brahms. There was Eduard Hanslick, the 
austere apostle of classic form, Joseph Joachim, 
the master-violinist of his age, and Theodore Bill- 
roth, supremely great as a surgeon but no less of 
a striking figure as a pianist and composer. Amid 
such environment young Forchheimer's receptive 
and impressionable mind was moulded. Here he 
7 gathered the riches of mind and heart that failed 
his life to overflowing, true to the Hippocratic 
aphorism which places the shortness of life and 
the length and richness of art in juxtaposition. 
In the contemplation of the life of Forchheimer, 
the scientist and physician, and Forchheimer, the 
dreamer and artist, upon whom the Muses smiled 
all through his career, we see consummate per- 
fection, a veritable ideal of happy existence. Such 
a life has no sorrow, such a death no sting. .Fred- 
erick Forchheimer, our departed fellow'-member 
and colleague, passed from our mist, 
" sustained and soothed 
By an unfaltering trust, approached the grave 
Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch 
About him and lies down to pleasant dreams." 
8