University of Maryland School of Pharmacy - Terra Mariae Yearbook (Baltimore, MD)

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U ' I KRSITV OF MARVLAXI) HL ' I I.DING.

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PROFESSOR WILLIAM TRAVIS HOWARD, M.D., LL.D. Professor William Travis Howard, who for thirty years, from 1867 to 1897, occupied the Chair of Diseases of Women and Children in the School of Medicine of the University of Maryland, was born in Cumberland County, A ' irginia, on January 13, 1821. After completing his early academic studies at Hampden- Sidney and Randolph-Macon Colleges, in Virginia, he began the study of medicine under Dr. John P. Mettauer, an emi- nent surgeon in the lower part of Virginia. His professional education was continued at the Jefferson Medical College, in Philadelphia, at which he entered as a student in 1842, and received the degree of Doctor of Medicine in 184-4. During the intervals between the sessions of this College he pursued his studies at the Baltimore Alms House, a hospital which afforded excellent opportunities for clinical investigation under the teaching of Professor Wm. Power, who held the Chair of Medicine in the University of Mary- ' land, and was distinguished as a clinician, and especially as a proficient in anscultatury diagnosis, in which he had been trained by the eminent Louis, in Paris. Through this teaching and his own devotion to study. Dr. Howard became a skillful diagnostician and therapeutist, and a very accom- plished auscultator. After finishing his term of clinical work at this Hospital, Dr. Howard began the practice of medicine in Warrenton, North Carolina, and soon acquired a large professional business both in his own section of the State and as a consultant in various places, many of them at a distance. to which he was frequently called. Soon after the close of the Civil A ' ar he removed from North Carolina to Baltimore, where his reputation as an able physician had preceded him, as he was well known to members of the profession here ; and in 1867 he was elected as its first incumbent to the newly-created Chair of Diseases of Women and Children in the University of Maryland, which, it is believed, was the first school in this country to establish those branches as constituting a separate chair. The reputation which Professor Howard had made in North Carolina served to attract many more students from that State to the University of Maryland than had ever come before. He brought to the duties of the post the fruits of large experience, extensive learning and great mental acuteness, as shown by diagnostic skill and therapeutic resources and methods. Although he had not previously given special attention to surgery, he soon made himself, by earnest devotion to work, a dextrous o|)crator in cases of surgical gynecology. He was one of the founders of the American Gynecological Society, and was elected President of that body in 1885. He never withdrew him- self, however, from medicine in the wider sense, and his acquirements and ex]5erience as a ]ihysician enabled him to practice with all the more success as a gynecologist. As a teacher, he was lucid in the presentation of his subjects, logical in the statemen t of arguments supjiorting his position, and emphatic in the expression of his own opinions, but fortifying them with abundant testimonv from the writings of authorities with whom his habits as a student and his remarkable memory made him familiar. 13