David Hosack

David Hosack
Portrait of Hosack by Rembrandt Peale, 1826
Born	(1769-08-31)August 31, 1769 New York City, Province of New York, British America
Died	December 22, 1835(1835-12-22) (aged 66) New York City, New York, United States
Nationality	American
Education	King's College College of Philadelphia College of New Jersey University of Edinburgh
Medical career
Profession	Physician, Botanist and Educator

David Hosack FRS FRSE FLS (August 31, 1769 – December 22, 1835), a noted physician, botanist, and educator, is perhaps most widely known as the doctor who attended to Philip Hamilton after his fatal duel, and soon afterward his father Alexander Hamilton after his deadly duel with Aaron Burr.

Born in New York City to parents Alexander Hossack (sic), a merchant from Elgin in Scotland and his wife Jane Arden, David was the first of their seven children. Following the end of the American Revolution, Hosack was sent to New Jersey academies to further his education, first in Newark and then Hackensack. He would go on to attend Columbia College, now a branch of Columbia University, where he began as a student of art, but eventually became fascinated by medicine. Young David would eventually enter into an apprenticeship with Dr. Richard Bayley. While studying under Bayley in early 1788 at New York Hospital, a mob formed outside of the hospital, as the illicit obtainment of cadavers from graveyards left medical teaching scandalous and disliked. After a medical student taunted the crowd by waving the arm of one of the corpses out of a window at the mob, a riot ensued and Hosack, trying to protect the laboratory, was hit on the head with a heavy stone. Shortly after the mob incident Hosack transferred to the College of New Jersey, or today's Princeton University. Hosack graduated from Princeton in 1789 and quickly enrolled as a student under Dr. Nicholas Romayne, where he regularly visited homes for the poor and insane, as they were the only places to offer clinical instruction. In the fall of 1790 Hosack transferred to a medical school in Pennsylvania, where he wrote a doctoral dissertation on cholera. He received his medical degree the following spring, shortly after marrying Catharine Warner, whom he had first met at Princeton. David and Catharine moved to Alexandria, Virginia shortly after their marriage, where Dr. Hosack opened his first medical practice. Their son Alexander was born in June 1792, shortly before the family moved back to New York City. In his few years in the medical field, Hosack had learned that the best practitioners had received at least some of their schooling in Europe, so his father agreed to pay his way to Britain in order to obtain said schooling.