M E M 0 1 R 
OF 
JOHN CALL DALTON. 
1825-1889. 
BY 
S. WEIR MITCHELL. 
Head before the National Academy, April 1G, 1890. 
177 BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF JOHN CALL DALTON. 
Gentlemen : Our late member, John Call Dalton, was for 
years a peculiar and influential personage in the profession of Medi- 
cine in America. There had been before his day men who were 
noted for single papers on physiological subjects or who had spent 
brief periods on physiological investigation. Some of the work 
thus done was valuable and original, but always it was that of 
physicians who stepped aside from their other pursuits to follow 
experimental study for a brief season, and who went back again to 
the ordinary routine of their profession. It would, indeed, be too 
easy to enumerate their essays. 
The man to whose memory I devote these pages was the first 
among us to give a life to the single pursuit of experimental physi- 
ology and its related sciences. I shall presently speak of what he 
was and did, but it is humanly interesting to note here that out of 
this singleness of pursuit and out of the fact that he was the first 
to content himself with physiology as a laboratory life-work there 
came to him a reputation above and beyond that which his dis- 
coveries justified, but which was fairly the reward of an unselfish 
devotion, which followed with simplicity of purpose and indifference 
to material gains one single path untroubled by greed and undis- 
turbed by mean ambitions. 
He was our first professional physiologist. Of no other science 
save physiology could it be said that it had then no practical 
students in America. Before his day there had been esteemed 
professors who, like Robley, Dunglison, and Samuel Jackson, pos- 
sessed singular powers of acquisition, critical ability, and eloquent 
capacity to express the thoughts of others. A physiological lecture 
was in that day a more or less well stated resume of the best foreign 
books, without experiments or striking illustrations. It was like 
hearing about a foreign laud into which we wTere forbidden to enter. 
I well recall the really admirable lectures of my own preceptor, 
Dunglison, who was brought to America by Thomas Jefferson to 
lecture at the University of Virginia, and thence came north to the 
school at which I learned as much of my profession as men learn 
179 NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES. 
on college benches. I am amused to remember how much of the 
physiology I learned seemed to have but two dimensions. The 
imagination was freely called upon to aid us in our conception of 
active functions. We saw, for example, as illustrative of the cir- 
culation of the blood, certain diagrams, and also a dead bullock’s 
heart layed open to exhibit the cavities and the valves. Years 
afterwards I first saw in an etherized animal the living, moving 
heart. The swift certainty of the successive motions of this bound- 
ing thing (itself like an individual existence) filled me at once with a 
fresh conception of the delicacy and wonder of the vital mechanism 
amidst which I had been moving, so to speak, with but the slightest 
realization of its marvel and mystery. Now, at last, 
“ I saw with heart serene 
The very pulse of the machine.” 
The vehement energy of movement—certain, accurate almost as 
a clock—filled me then for a time, as it did the great Harvey, with 
a sense that surely it was to be comprehended but by God alone. 
I seemed to have become before this coarsely familiar with the 
human body—familiar, perhaps, to disrespect. A single object- 
lesson on the living heart, a thing unseen by me before or only 
heard or felt, left me with a never lost and most useful respect for the 
mystery of it all, and a feeling of need for care which could not be 
too thoughtful. 
Since then, as a teacher, I have seen the good influence of such 
object-lessons on other men who were learning the sadly uncertain 
Art of Medicine in youthful disbelief of uncertainties. 
In my student days, as I have said, no teacher habitually brought 
us face to face with these phenomena of vital physics, and when 
once they were shown their influence on intelligence was lasting. 
Nature is, alas, only too shy ; but we may at least get nearer to 
what she reveals than a mere description. For the neglect of the 
classical scholar-professor to show, as far as might be, the animal 
mechanisms in action there was reasonable excuse. No man is 
justified in showing to a class mere repetitions of experiments at the 
cost of pain to animals, but about the time Dalton began to 
teach ether enabled us to do without pain what before would have 
been cruel. He was prompt to see that a new era had opened for 
the teacher of physiology, 
Dalton began almost at once to illustrate with living animals the 
processes of life as he taught them in lectures. He was the first to 
180 JOHN CALL DALTON. 
do this in America. It was a vastly useful lessou to all who fol- 
lowed him, for lectures should be largely commentaries on experi- 
ments ; almost all else can be had in books. But books do not show 
arterial pressures ; they only state them. They but describe the heart, 
whose perplexity and mystery of motion must be seen to be appre- 
ciated. I confess to the belief that in medical teaching most di- 
dactic lectures might he dispensed with and books and recitations 
take their place. But in Physiology, Anatomy, Therapeutics, and 
Chemistry the lecture with its profusion of illustrative experiments 
should remain. 
As his practical skill in experimeut led Dalton to use it in adorn- 
ing his teaching, it tempted him very early into the field of research, 
and here for many years my friend and I were quite alone—the 
pioneers among us of work now become large and productive, but 
then looked upon with doubt and even suspicion, as something with 
which the practical doctor had better have no concern. Dalton, 
unembarrassed by daily practice, went his way untroubled and was, 
I believe, the first American Physiologist who declined to practice 
medicine. Older men not only disapproved of this divorce, but 
also considered the active pursuit of physiological knowledge in the 
laboratory as inimical at least to worldly success in the practice of 
medicine. Prof. Samuel Jackson once said to me, “ You will lose a 
patient for every experiment you make in the laboratory.” But 
times have changed, and he was altogether wrong. 
John Call Dalton was born in Chelmsford, Mass., February 2, 
1825, of a line of able physicians, himself destined to give the name a 
permanent place in American Science. Doubly indebted to Har- 
vard for degrees in arts and medicine, he found in Paris a teacher 
under whom he turned with eager zest to experimental physiology. 
I remember having heard Dalton, when px’aisiug his great master, 
tell how once he himself had said, “ I think it must be so ; ” to which 
Claude Bernard replied, “ Think! Why think, when you can experi- 
ment?” Bernard strongly influenced the men who sought his 
courses, and I for one, like Dalton, must gladly acknowledge the 
educative powers of this sturdy genius. 
On his return home Dalton calmly put aside the ambitious calls 
of mere practical life in my profession; nor, indeed, did he seem to 
me fitted to excel in these. In 1831 his essay on the “ Corpus Lu- 
teum ” received a prize from the American Medical Association ; 
nevertheless, in 1860 he advised me against contending for the same 
181 NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES. 
prize. I do not now recall why. I sent in as an essay my well- 
known Smithsonian work on “Serpent Venoms,” and was not the 
winner of the prize. 
Soon came the appointment to teach Physiology at Buffalo, 
which he left for the same work in 1854 at the University of Ver- 
mont. From this Chair to the Long Island Hospital School we 
trace him in 1859, and this year also he finished his Text Book of 
Physiology, which in 1882 had reached its seventh edition—a clear, 
concise treatise, in that day without rival, for it was written by one 
who had seen experimentally almost' every known fact of the science 
he taught. Then came a long break in the scientific record. 
The War made a claim upon Dalton to which he replied without 
hesitation. Amidst the numerous demands made by that great 
struggle none were so hard to fill as those for the best surgical ad- 
vice. The history of what my profession did in and for the great 
cause has yet to be fitly told. I think Dalton little liked the life 
in the field and hospital, and this is shown by the fact that with 
all his great powers as an intellectual observer his experience of 
thousands of cases evolved nothing of value. He had not the type 
of mind needed for clinical study. He was at this time Professor 
of Physiology and Microscopical Anatomy in the College of Physi- 
cians and Surgeons in New York, and urged me to assume his 
lectures while he was absent; but this my own hospital duties 
rendered impossible. 
Soon after the War he became full Professor of Physiology in the 
great New York School and declined all temptations to go else- 
where—lecturing, working, observing, experimenting, and only 
tempted forth from the laboratory to take the place of Vice-Presi- 
dent of the New York Academy of Medicine from 1874 to 1877. 
During many years the public knew little of Dalton, except 
when he appeared before legislative committees or in print in de- 
fense of Science against Mr. Berg and such others as wished to carry 
legislative interference even beyond the follies of the British law, 
and to deny to us all use of animals in the laboratory. In this 
contest Dalton was always successful. His intense, fiery spirit, 
his profound convictions and vast knowledge, routed all opponents. 
His singular ability in the management of his case was not less re- 
markable than his skill at logical defense or his wealth of defensive 
illustration. For this fierce and able battle we owe him much, and 
there will belittle need to re-argue the matter whilst his presenta- 
182 JOHN CALL DALTON. 
tion of it remains in his delightful little volume on the “Experi- 
mental Method in Medicine ” and his “ History of the Doctrines of 
the Circulation.” In the former book is an essay on Buffon’s 
“ Theory of Organic Molecules” and Buffon’s “ Theory of the In- 
clusion of Germs.” I know few essays on dead and very dry 
science made so interesting as this by the mere literary qualities 
of the writer—a matter too much neglected by men of science ; for 
assuredly it is true that even an arid description of a shell or a beetle 
may gain interest from the charm of a style precisely fitted to the 
task. The man is not always to be found between the pages of his 
book, but in these essays we get some glimpses of a man keen and 
logical, faintly cynical in no ill-tempered fashion, and here and there 
unexpectedly humorous, as he was in social life. 
Of a quantity of papers on the cerebellum, placenta, digestion, 
hydatids, toenia, etc., I have not time to speak in full. One of his 
best pieces of physiological work was a brilliant experimental essay 
on the “ Sugar-making Functions of the Liver.” After Bernard’s 
revolutionary discovery of this new liver function it was denied by 
Pavy, who really seemed to have demonstrated the great French- 
man’s error. Dalton’s paper brushed away the whole critical fabric 
of Bernard’s opponents, and since then physiological opinion has 
remained settled upon’this question. 
Of late years the Presidency of the College of Physicians and 
Surgeons, keen contests with the vivisectionists, and alas, too, in- 
creasing ill health and its sad claims for rest combined to lessen 
and at last to stop original work. He complained that societies, 
affairs, and public trusts took up his time, and this was true ; for 
when the public find a man like Dalton, honorable and energeti- 
cally efficient, it is prompt to weight him heavily, and this despite 
the belief that the man of science is inapt for business ; whereas 
he is competent as few men are when he chooses to drop his higher 
purposes and exercise his mind with the mere routine of business 
life or with the administration of affairs involving method and com- 
mon sense. 
In 1883 he thought best to resign the Chair of Physiology, but 
during the six remaining years of his life was as active as increasing 
disease permitted in his post of President of the College of Physi- 
cians and Surgeons. His later years were occupied with his great 
morphological work on the “Topography of the Brain.” For this 
he personally prepared all the specimens, and with sedulous care 
183 NATIONAL ACADEMY OE SCIENCES. 
followed the photographs made in his presence through the processes 
which at last ended in their production in his book. Of these noble 
quartos of superb illustration and careful description one may frankly 
speak in terms of warm praise. I know of no other “ Anatomy of 
the Brain ” so satisfactory for reference. It is pure gross anatomy 
of surface or sections. No word of tracks or fibres or of functions ; 
it is all pure macroscopy. 
John Dalton was elected a member of the Academy in 1864, and 
for a long time was seen at our meetings ; but very far back he 
began to feel the lack of energy due to the onset of disease, and 
ceased to be with us often. Historically, he represents in our story 
the first academic recognition of Physiology. Few of us, perhaps, 
recall his quaint, earnest, attentive face, accentuated as to feature, 
bearded to the loss of facial expression ; the forward set brow, the 
keen eyes, at times vividly humorous in expression ; something about 
his face very honest, very intent, very strong—a face which surprised 
one by its sudden illuminations. 
He had, says a pupil, the “teaching instinct”—thinking of class, 
of theme, of the questioning faces before him, but never of himself 
or how he would appear. No side issue disturbed him, and he had 
the skill to make the difficult appear simple, and evidently rejoiced 
in his power to make things plain. Now and then some side light 
gave a glimpse of his encyclopaedic knowledge, but he made no 
excursions for mere amusement’s sake; all was clear, logical, and 
the manner of it earnest, yet lively. At times his illustrations were 
the inspirations of the moment, as when to show the relations of 
the corona radiata in the brain to the basal ganglia he began to 
arrange hastily scraps of felt on the radiating fibres of a broom. 
He had the rare gift of making those who listened desire to become 
investigators. He made men think. Possibly lecture interests ab- 
sorbed too much of him, but he really created a method of teaching 
his branch such as was before unknown among us. 
Dalton was a man of whom I saw much at times. He once came 
to me to offer a Chair in the College of Physicians and Surgeons 
and once I went to him with the gift of the Chair of Physiology in 
the University of Pennsylvania. He frequently consulted me as to 
his own work, and he took in mine the warmest and most unselfish 
interest, and was more pleased than I when something new and 
valuable was uncovered. 
In social life he was inclined to be quiet; but if disturbed as to 
184 JOHN CALL DALTON. 
his political or economic views (which he held with tenacity) he was 
an interested, swift and ready talker, defending himself with skill 
and humor, and at times with excess of vehemence. 
It is pleasant to show another side of this vigorous personality. 
As a man he lived the simplest of lives—a bachelor, in a tiny 
suite of rooms, eating quietly at his club, unstirred by the venal 
ambitions of the roaring world of greedy trade around him in New 
York. Here among the greater books of the past, with a wide 
choice of subjects, you might find him with Cicero, the Arabian 
Nights, or Galen or Sydenham. This quiet scholar and profound 
man of science was tranquil and self-possessed under fire in battle, 
as I have been told by one who had seen him in the field. He was 
a bold horseman, and in his younger days a venturous rider across 
country. 
A long and painful illness at last made impossible the labor 
which he best loved, and one by one he fell out of the public and 
social relations which made life valuable to others and pleasant to 
both them and himself. 
A year before he died, an attack of uraemic convulsions occurred 
and left him for a time with asphasia. Says a friend* “ It was al- 
most amusing to observe the characteristic curiosity with which he 
watched the phenomena of his disease, studying it apparently with 
as much interest as if he were observing it in another person.” 
Despite the nature of his malady, he carried his meutal clearness 
and active intellectual interests near to the time of death, as it were, 
undisturbed by the crumbling ruin of his bodily frame. Well 
aware of the approach of death, he met his fate with quiet courage, 
and so came to the end of a well-filled life, in which he brought to 
the service of his country his science, his profession, persistent 
energy, great intelligence, a fine sense of honor, and all the minor 
characteristics of a true and manly gentleman. 
* W. H. Draper, M. D. 
185