Samuel Akerly

Samuel Akerly was an American medical doctor, born in New York City in May 1785 and dead on Staten Island on 6 July 1845. He graduated from Columbia College in 1804, took a master of arts in 1807 and then a medical degree from the College of Physicians and Surgeons. In 1808 he exchanged letters with Benjamin Rush on mercury as a possible cure for tuberculosis, and in the War of 1812 he served as Post Surgeon for the United States Army at Fort Gansevoort. From 1821 to 1831 he was superintendent, secretary and attending physician of the New York Institution for the Deaf, where he also looked for medical cures for deafness without success, and in 1831 he helped found the New York Institute for the Education of the Blind and served as its president until 1842. He made an early alphabet for the blind in 1833. His writings ranged from conchology and geology to a medical dictionary, and he was an early vice-president of the New York Academy of Sciences.