David Hosack

David Hosack was an American medical doctor, botanist and educator, born in New York City in 1769 and dead in 1835. He trained by apprenticeship with Richard Bayley and Nicholas Romayne, graduated from Princeton in 1789, took his medical degree at the University of Pennsylvania in 1791 with a dissertation on cholera, and studied at Edinburgh, where he became one of the leading American scholars of botany. From 1796 he practised in New York City, largely as a family physician including pediatric and obstetric care. He is widely remembered as the doctor who tended Alexander Hamilton after his duel with Aaron Burr in 1804, and who had treated Hamilton son Philip after a duel in 1801. In 1801 he created the Elgin Botanic Garden, the first botanical garden in America, and in 1798 he proposed the first lying-in hospital in New York.