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Simon Baruch
American physician, born July 29, 1840, Schwersenz, Posen, Prussia (now Poznan, Poland), died June 4, 1921, New York.
Associated eponyms:
Baruch Institute
Established by the American millionaire Bernard Mannes Baruch (1870-1965) after 1943 in memory of his father Simon Baruch, for the purpose of furthering rational use of physical rehabilitation.
Baruch's law
Theory that water has a sedative effect when its temperature is the same as that of the skin and a stimulating effect when it is above or below the skin temperature.
Biography:
Simon Baruch was born to a Jewish family of Spanish ancestry in the then Prussian town of Schwersenz. He received his preliminary education at the Royal Gymnasium in Posen (now Poznan in Poland). He came to America in 1855 and settled in Camden, South Carolina. He had a driving ambition to study medicine, a profession that was closed to him in his native land but wuickly opened for him in the antebellum South with the help of local Jewish physicians. He studied medicine at the South Carolina Medical College and the Medical College of Virginia. He graduated MD from the latter in 1862.
When the Civil War started, Baruch joined the Confederate Army under General Robert E. Lee and was assigned as a surgeon in the field with the rank of Captain. "South Carolina gave me all I have," he said at the time, "I'll go with my state". In the Battle of Bull Run the Brigade to which he was attached was sent to aid Stonewall Jackson’s corps, which had gotten in the rear of Pope’s army of the Potomac. When the Confederate tropps withdrew Dr. Baruch was left in charge of threescore wounded men in a church at Boonsboro and was captured with the wounded men, by the Union troops.
After several months’ imprisonment there was an exchange of prisoners and Baruch took to the field again with the Confederate army. On the third day of the battle of Gettysburg he was again taken prisoner while attending to the wounded. He was sent to Fort McHenry. While in a Federal war prison he wrote a book on gunshot wounds.
During the sixteen years that followed the close of the war Baruch practised medicine in Camden. Throughout that period he served as President of the South Carolina Medical Association and as Chairman of the State Board of Health.
Baruch moved back to New York in 1881 and became a consulting physician of wide repute in chronic cases. He was a physician at the Juvenile Asylum, where hed died in 1931. In 1889 he diagnosed the first recorded case of perforating appendicitis successfully operated on, an achievement that was reported by Dr. Henry Berton Sands (1830-1888) of The New York Medical Journal. Professor John Allan Wyeth (1845-1929) stated before the Academy of Medicine that “the profession and humanity owe more to Dr. Baruch than to any other man for the development of surgery of appendicitis.” In 1867 Baruch discovered the discolorizing effect of the hyposulphites upon tincture of iodine.
In 1889 Baruch visited Germany and investigated the public baths there. Shortly after, he wrote a plea in the form of an editorial in a medical journal, The Times and Register. He was then Chairman of the Committee on Hygiene of the New York Medical Society. It was not until 1895, however, that the Legislature came to his assistance with a bill making it possible for Boards of Health to order a certain number of public baths. Much opposition arose, but in March 1901 the Rivington Street Bath, first of its kind in the country, was established. The bath demonstrated its usefulness at once and others were soon established. Sixteen years later a bronze tablet commemorating the work was placed in the Rivington Street bath.
Simon Baruch is regarded as a pioneer of hydrotherapy in America. His interest in this was evoked by the hydrotherapeutic cures of Vienna’s Wilhelm Winternitz (1835-1917) who has been called "the father of scientific hydrotherapy”.
In 1913 he was hired to evaluate the medicinal values of Saratoga Springs. The Mohawks venerated the mineral waters of Saratoga Springs. American "Continentals," sickened, wounded and soiled by the Revolutionary War, went there to cleanse and heal themselves. In 1825 John Clarke, who started the first soda fountain in Manhattan, began to bottle and sell carbonated water from Saratoga.
During the war Barch did much valuable work for the United States Public Health Services. He visited Camp Devent several times in connection with the hydrotherapeutic plant installed there and Camp Upton to demonstrate the water treatment for pneumonia. He became the first professor of hydrotherapy in America, at the College of Physicians and Surgeons, Columbia University. He was the first president of the American Association for the Promotion of Hygiene and Public Health, 1894. He was the publisher of Dietetic and Hygienic Gazette, of the Journal of Balneology, and of Gaillard’s Medical Journal.
During the war Baruch, in a newspaper article drew a comparison between the military and sanitary histoy of the country to show there were “pacifists” in medical affairs as well as in military affairs.
“We find in medicine”, he wrote, “the same maudlin opposition to war against disease as you find today among pacifists. The former are moved to tears by the alleged cruelties to guinea pigs, rabbits, dogs and other negligible animals which are used for the purpose of studying antidotes to infectious diseases, but they are oblivious to the suffering of those afflicted by those diseases and the sorrows of those whom death has deproved of relatives and friends through the large mortality of those diseases and also the economic losses resulting from the latter.
The nonmedical opponents protest against war on smallpox, saying that we introduce disease into the human body. Just as the civilian pacifists say today that universal military training would stimulate a warlike spirit among our peaceful citizens. You know that smallpox has almost been abolished by vaccination, and yet these maudlin reformers continued their tirades upon vaccination. Vivisection, which horrifies them, has enlightened the medical profession upon the cause and treatment of many fatal diseases, and thus prepared the way for abolishing them.”
When the prohibition question was before the country Dr. Baruch asserted that he favored a law against the importattion, manufacture and sale of distilled liquors, but that he believed in the production of beer of low alcoholic percentage.
Baruch married in 1867 Miss Isabel Wolfe of Winnsboro, South Carolina. In 1917 they celebrated their golden weddings as Sherry’s, with more than 1,000 guests attending. Receiving with Dr. and Mrs. Baruch were their four sons, Bernard M. Baruch, Chairman during the war of the Council of National Defense; Dr. and Mrs. Herman B. Baruch, Mr. and Mrs. Hartwig N. Baruch and Mr. and Mrs. Sailing W. Baruch. Eight of the nine grandchildren were in the family group.
«There are no such things as incurable, there are only things for which man has not found a cure.»
Quoted by Bernard Baruch in an address to the President’s Committee on Employment of the Physically Handicapped, April 30, 1954.
Biographical:
The New York Times, June 4, 1921.
- August Hirsch (1817-1894), publisher:
Biographisches Lexikon der hervorragenden Ärzte aller Zeiten und Völker.
2nd edition. Berlin, Urban & Schwarzenberg, 1929.
First published in 6 volumes 1884-1888. 3rd edition, München 1962.
- W. Haberling and H. Vierordt::
Biographisches Lexikon der hervorragenden Ärzte aller Zeiten und Völker.
Ergänzungsband. Berling and Vienna, 1935.
- Maurice B. Strauss, editor:
Familiar Medical Quotations.Boston, Little, Brown and Company, 1968.
- Patricia Spain Ward:
Simon Baruch: Rebel in the Ranks of Medicine, 1840-1921.
University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa, Alabama. January 1994.
Bibliography:
- Henry Berton Sands (1830-1888):
On account of a case in which recovery took place after laparotomy had been performed for septic peritonitis due to a perforation of the veriform appendix.
The New York Medical Journal, February 25, 1888.
Simon Baruch:
- Hypodermic medication. The Richmond and Louisville Medical Journal, 1866.
- Uterine diseases among the lower classes.
The Richmond and Louisville Medical Journal, 1870.
- Hydrate chloral and bromide potassium in tetanus.
The Richmond and Louisville Medical Journal, 1873.
- Discovery of decoloring effect of sulphite on jodine.
The Medical Record, New York, 1868.
- Subinvolution of uterus.
The Charleston Medical Journal and Review, New series, volume 1, 1873.
- A Neglected point in the medico-legal aspect of strychnine poisoning.
Transactions of the South Carolina Medical Society, 1877.
- The Uses of Water in Modern Medicine New York, 1892.
- Successful Treatment of Typhoid Fever. New York, 1893.
Introducing cold-water treatment of Brand in New York.
- Application of Water in Intractable Disease. New York, 1893.
- The Principles And Practice Of Hydrotherapy: A Guide To The Application Of Water In Disease For Students And Practitioners Of Medicine.
New York : William Wood and Company, 1898. Third edition in 1908.
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