John Gorham (physician)

He graduated from Harvard in 1801, with a B.A., and later received two medical degrees there (M.B., 1804, after serving for three years as an apprentice to John Warren, whose daughter Mary he married in 1808,[1] and M.D., 1811). Between his medical degrees, he studied chemistry privately in London with Friedrich Accum, and then with Thomas Hope at the University of Edinburgh. He opened a medical practice in Boston in 1806, and maintained it throughout his academic career.[1] In 1809 he was appointed adjunct professor of chemistry and materia medica in Harvard, and in 1816 was made professor of chemistry and mineralogy. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1810.[2]

Gorham resigned his academic position in 1827 to give more attention to his thriving medical practice. He was librarian (1814-1818), treasurer (1818-1823) and recording secretary (1823-1826), for the Massachusetts Medical Society.[1][3]

• Inaugural Address (1817),[4] which prompted a letter of commendation from John Adams
• Elements of Chemical Science (1819)
• “Contribution on Sugar” in Thomas's Annual Philosophy (1817)
• “Chemical Analysis of Indian Corn,” The New England Journal of Medicine and Surgery, 9(1820):320-28.

He was a founder, and for 15 years an editor, of The New England Journal of Medicine and Surgery, where he published several papers.

• This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Wilson, J. G.; Fiske, J., eds. (1900). "Gorham, John" . Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography. New York: D. Appleton.
• Newell, Lyman C. (1931). "Gorham, John". Dictionary of American Biography. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.