WOOD, George
Bacon, author, born in Greenwich, Cumberland County, New Jersey, 13
March, 1797; died in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 30 March, 1879. He
received his early education in the city of New York, was graduated at the
University of Pennsylvania in 1815, and in medicine in 1818, and in 1820
delivered a course of lectures on chemistry in Philadelphia. He was
professor of chemistry in the Philadelphia college of pharmacy in 1822-'31,
of Materia Medica in 1831-'5, held the same chair in the University of
Pennsylvania in 1835-'50, and that of the theory and practice of medicine in
that institution from 1850 till 1860, when he resigned. He was eminently
successful as a lecturer, and while in the chair of Materia Medica exhibited
to the students many specimens of rare living tropical and other exotics,
which he had secured at great expense, and of which he had occasion to treat
in his lectures. In 1865 he endowed an auxiliary faculty of medicine in the
University of Pennsylvania composed of five chairs--zoology and comparative
anatomy, botany, mineralogy and geology, hygiene, and medical jurisprudence
and toxicology--and by will he endowed the Peter Hahn ward of the University
hospital. He was physician in the Pennsylvania hospital in 1835-'59, became
president of the American philosophical society in 1859, and was for many
years president of the College of physicians of Philadelphia. With Franklin
Bache, M. D., he published "The Dispensatory of the United States"
(Philadelphia, 1833). Of this work 150,000 copies were sold during Dr.
Wood's lifetime, the royalty to the authors being about $155,000. He also
published "A Treatise on the Practice of Medicine" (2 vols., 184';); " A
Treatise on Therapeutics and Pharmacology, or Materia Medica" (2 vols.,
1856) ; "Introductory Lectures and Addresses on Medical Subjects" (1859).
