Frank Hastings Hamilton

Frank Hastings Hamilton was an American surgeon born in Wilmington, Vermont, in 1813. He graduated from Union College in 1830, apprenticed with a prison physician at Auburn, and took his medical degree at the University of Pennsylvania in 1835. In 1846 he co-founded the medical department of the University of Buffalo, serving as its first dean and teaching surgery there for fourteen years, and in 1854 he attempted the first successful skin graft at the school. He later joined the founders of Bellevue Hospital Medical College in New York as professor of surgery. During the Civil War he treated casualties at the First Battle of Bull Run, became a brigade surgeon and medical inspector, and was named the first Chair of Military Medicine in the United States. His treatises on fractures and dislocations and on military surgery were standard references for decades, and several signs and bandages carry his name. He died in New York City in 1886.