Rufus Henry Gilbert

Rufus Henry Gilbert (1832 to 1885) was an American surgeon and inventor who linked his medical concerns to the problem of how a crowded city should move its people. Born in Guilford, New York, the son of a county judge, he studied at the New York College of Physicians and Surgeons and practised in New York City, where he came to see cramped, overly centralized working-class housing as a serious public health hazard and began to think of urban rapid transit as the way to more sanitary living conditions. In the American Civil War he served as a surgeon with the 5th New York Volunteer Infantry and is credited with performing the first surgical procedure of the war, at the Battle of Big Bethel. He was brevetted lieutenant colonel in 1865 and went on to become medical director and superintendent of the United States Army Hospitals. Ill health ended his further career in medicine, and he turned to railways, patenting a pneumatic elevated railway in 1870 and founding a company whose Sixth Avenue line opened in 1878. He was pushed out of the company soon afterward and died in New York City in 1885.