Erasmus Darwin Hudson

Erasmus Darwin Hudson (1805 to 1880) was an American medical doctor and anti-slavery organizer, born on 15 December 1805 in Torringford, Connecticut, and dead on 31 December 1880 in Greenwich, Connecticut. He graduated from Berkshire Medical College in 1827 and practised in Bloomfield, Connecticut from 1828 to 1833. Around 1850 he became a general and orthopedic surgeon, first in Springfield, Massachusetts and then in New York City, where he devoted himself to orthopedic surgery and mechanical apparatus for deformities and artificial limbs. During the American Civil War the federal government appointed him to fit apparatus to men with gunshot injuries of bone, resections, ununited fractures and amputations at the knee and ankle, and he invented prosthetic and orthopedic appliances whose awards came at the 1867 Paris Exposition Universelle and the 1876 Centennial Exhibition. From 1837 to 1849 he was a lecturing agent of the Connecticut Anti-Slavery Society and general agent of the American Anti-Slavery Society. His monographs include Resections, Syme's Amputation and Immobile Apparatus for Ununited Fractures.