Bowditch Legs

Legless women excited Nathaniel Ingersoll Bowditch (1805-61) to pity. In 1860 he gave $5,000 to the Massachusetts General Hospital for the purchase of wooden legs. Meticulous, he specified: "I should desire that female patients should be preferred to males." For 69 years the hospital has been obeying his instructions, but the need has been dwindling. Rare is it now that amputations must be made. Hence the hospital recently asked a Massachusetts probate court, and last week was granted, permission to merge the Bowditch leg fund with its general fund.

Rich was Nathaniel Ingersoll Bowditch, eldest of the great Nathaniel Bowditch's (1773-1838) eight children. The Bowditches are among the oldest of U. S. families, descended as they are from one William Bowditch who lived at Salem, Mass., from 1639.

Nathaniel Bowditch made his fortune as actuary of the Massachusetts Life Insurance Co.; his fame, as translator-commentator of Laplace's Mecanique Celeste. Nathaniel Ingersoll Bowditch increased his patrimony by practicing law in Boston. He wrote his father's biography. His brother was Henry Ingersoll (all Nathaniel's children had Ingersoll for middle name) Bowditch (1808-92), Harvard medical professor, discoverer of the "all-or-nothing" reaction of the heart muscle,* inventor of a way to drain chests in pleurisy. The only Bowditch now living sufficiently famed for Who's Who recognition is Vincent Yardley Bowditch, 76, Boston tuberculosis specialist. He is a nephew of the leg-giving Bowditch. In the family tradition he has written a biography of his father.

*If a nerve reacts to a stimulus at all, it does so with all its might.