Thomas Bond (American physician)

Thomas Bond was an American physician and surgeon, born in Calvert County, Maryland, in 1713 and died in Philadelphia in 1784. He studied medicine in Annapolis and in Europe, mainly Paris, and then practised in Philadelphia for about fifty years. With his friend Benjamin Franklin he helped found the American Philosophical Society in 1743, and in 1751 the two co-founded the Pennsylvania Hospital, the first medical facility in the American colonies, where Bond served without pay as surgeon and teacher until his death. He was known for amputations and bladder stone operations, performed the first lithotomy in the United States at that hospital in 1756, and devised a splint for forearm fractures that carried his name. In 1766 he began clinical lectures for medical students at the University of Pennsylvania, earning the title Father of Clinical Medicine, and during the Revolutionary War he helped organise the medical department of the Continental Army.