Edmund Andrews (surgeon)

Edmund Andrews was an American doctor, born at Putney, Vermont, on 22 April 1824 and dead in Chicago on 22 January 1904, a pioneer in surgery and medical education in the western United States. He took his medical degree at the University of Michigan in 1851, became professor of comparative anatomy there, helped found the Michigan State Medical Society, and in the middle 1850s moved to Chicago, where he devoted himself to surgery. He was one of the founders of the Chicago Medical College and its first professor of surgery, and a surgeon to Mercy Hospital. As a surgeon of the First Illinois Light Artillery in the Civil War he kept complete medical records of the sick and wounded, which the surgeon general accepted as the basis of later record keeping. He was a pioneer of practical antisepsis, the first in the west to use Lister's method, and he published statistics on ether and chloroform anesthesia. He was also a respected geologist.