Henry Jacob Bigelow

Henry Jacob Bigelow (March 11, 1818 – October 30, 1890) was an American surgeon and Professor of Surgery at Harvard University. A dominating figure in Boston medicine for many decades, he is remembered for the Bigelow maneuver for hip dislocation, a technique for treatment of kidney stones, and other innovations. He was instrumental in bringing the anesthetic possibilities of ether to the attention of medical men, and rescuing the case of Phineas Gage from relative obscurity. He was a vocal opponent of vivisection, and played a minor role in the apprehension of the culprit in the Parkman–Webster murder case.

Bigelow was born March 11, 1818 in Boston. His father, Jacob Bigelow, taught medicine at Harvard. Bigelow entered Harvard College at fifteen years old and, after a not entirely smooth undergraduate career (including an incident in which he discharged a musket in his Hollis Hall room) graduated in 1837. He studied medicine both at Harvard and at Dartmouth College (at the latter, under Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.), receiving his M.D. at Harvard in 1841. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1846.

His "Insensibility during Surgical Operations Produced by Inhalation" (1846), detailing the discovery of ether anesthesia, was selected by readers of the New England Journal of Medicine as the "most important article in NEJM history" in commemoration of the journal's 200th anniversary. "Dr. Harlow's case of Recovery from the passage of an Iron Bar through the Head" (1850) brought the case of Phineas Gage out of complete obscurity into merely relative obscurity, and largely neutralized remaining scepticism about the case.

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