Philip Syng Physick

Philip Syng Physick (1768 to 1837) was an American physician and surgeon born in Philadelphia, often called the Father of American Surgery. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1785, studied under Adam Kuhn and then in London under John Hunter, whose favourite dissecting pupil he became, and took his medical degree at Edinburgh in 1792. Back in Philadelphia he worked at the Pennsylvania Hospital and stayed in the city to care for the sick during the yellow fever epidemic of 1793. From 1805 to 1831 he was professor of surgery and later of anatomy at the University of Pennsylvania, and his teaching trained a generation of American surgeons. He devised or improved a number of instruments and methods, among them the stomach tube and stomach pump, absorbable sutures, needle forceps, a snare for tonsillectomy and splints and traction devices for dislocations, and in 1815 he introduced cataract extraction by suction through a tube. His patients included Dolley Madison and Chief Justice John Marshall.