Albert F. A. King
Albert F. A. King | |
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University of Vermont College of Medicine Providence Hospital (Washington, D.C.) Georgetown University | |
Thesis | Basis of an improved medical philosophy (1865) |
Albert Freeman Africanus King (18 January 1841 – 13 December 1914) was an English-born American physician who was pressed into service at
Early life
On 18 January 1841, King was born in Ambrosden, a village near Bicester in the Cherwell District of north-eastern Oxfordshire in England. He was the youngest of three children of Edward King and Louisa Freeman. His sister was Stella Louisa Elizabeth King (born 1838) and brother was Claudius Edward Richard King (born 1839). His father was a doctor interested in the colonization of Africa. He was named Africanus "because of his father's admiration" for that continent.[1] He attended Maley's School and the Bicester Diocesan School.
His family left Liverpool on 26 August 1854 to
Education and early career
King earned his (
Lincoln assassination
During the American Civil War, King was in Washington, DC. On 14 April 1865 he was in the audience at Ford's Theatre when President Abraham Lincoln was shot by John Wilkes Booth. He helped carry the dying President to a house across the street. Some suggest King was the first physician to reach Lincoln but the accounts of the other physicians present, Dr. Charles Augustus Leale and Dr. Charles Sabin Taft, suggest that King was second or third.[5]
Later life
In 1871, King became a professor of
Mosquito-malaria theory
In 1882, King proposed a method to eradicate malaria from Washington, DC. His method was to encircle the city with a wire screen as high as the Washington Monument. Many people took this as a jest, partly because the link between malaria and mosquitoes had, at that time, been hypothesized by only a few physicians. It was not until 1898 that Ronald Ross proved mosquitoes were a vector for malaria (he won the Nobel Prize for the discovery just four years later).[8] However impractical, King was on the right track for malaria control, well in advance of the rest of the medical profession.[9][10][11]
Honours
King was elected President of Medical Society of Washington, D.C. in 1883, and again in 1903. In 1883 the University of Vermont awarded him honorary master's degree. From 1885 to 1887 he was President of Washington Obstetrical and Gynecological Society. He received LLD degree from the University of Vermont in 1894. He was Fellow of British Gynecological Society, American Gynecological Society, and American Association for the Advancement of Science. He was Consulting Physician at Children's Hospital in Washington, D.C.. He was elected member of Washington Academy of Sciences, and Associate Member of the Victoria Institute, or Philosophical Society of Great Britain.
Personal life and death
King married Ellen Amory Dexter of Boston on 17 October 1894. Together they had two daughters, Louisa Freeman and Sarah Vincent. His wife died in 1935.
King died in Washington, D.C. due to senile debility, and is interred at Rock Creek Cemetery.
See also
- Abraham Lincoln assassination
- Anderson Ruffin Abbott
- Joseph K. Barnes
- Charles H. Crane
- Robert K. Stone
- History of malaria
References
- ^ Kunhardt. Twenty Days, p. 45
- doi:10.1038/147085d0.
- ^ "Dr. Edward King". ancestry.com. Retrieved 17 March 2014.
- ISBN 978-0-1952-2202-9.
- .
- ^ McCullough. The Path Between the Seas. Pg. 143
- ^ The Ariel. Burlington, VT: University of Vermont and State Agricultural College. 1891. p. 11.
- ^ McCullough. The Path Between the Seas. Pp. 409-410, 422
- PMID 11060174.
- PMID 15438311.
- PMID 17789057.
Sources
- Honigsbaum, Mark. The Fever Trail: In Search of the Cure for Malaria, Picador, 2003. ISBN 0-312-42180-X
- Kunhardt, Dorothy and Philip B. Kunhardt, Jr. Twenty Days: A Narrative in Text and Pictures of the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln and the Twenty Days and Nights That Followed. New York: Castle Books, 1965.
- McCullough, David. The Path Between the Seas. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1977.
- Roos, Charles A. Physicians to the Presidents, and Their Patients: A Biobibliography, Bulletin of the Medical Library Association. 1961.