Mason Fitch Cogswell

Mason Fitch Cogswell (1761 to 1830) was an American physician and surgeon from Connecticut. Born in Canterbury, he was raised after his mother's early death under the guardianship of Samuel Huntington and graduated from Yale as valedictorian in 1780. He studied medicine with his brother at the soldiers' hospital in New York City during the Revolutionary War and in time became one of the best known surgeons in the country, credited as one of the first in the United States to remove a cataract and as the first American to tie the carotid artery, in 1803. He lived in Hartford and moved among the Hartford Wits, a circle of local writers. His daughter Alice lost her hearing after a childhood illness at the age of two, and no school for deaf children then existed in America. Cogswell sent his neighbor Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet to Europe to learn teaching methods, and Gallaudet returned with Laurent Clerc. With them Cogswell helped found the American School for the Deaf in Hartford, where Alice was the first pupil. He died of pneumonia in 1830.