Joseph Smith Scholarship honoring Dr. Nathan Smith
The year 2013 marks the 200th anniversary of Joseph Smith’s life-threatening typhoid fever and the experimental and successful surgery performed by Dr. Nathan Smith, founder of Dartmouth Medical School (1811). The 1813 surgery blesses millions yet today. As a thank you, the Joseph Smith Sr. Family Association is working to establish a scholarship of gratitude on behalf of Dr. Nathan Smith to the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth Medical College.
Dr. Nathan Smith was the only physician in the United States who had the skill and ability to successfully treat Joseph’s infection. His personal preparation, life’s work, timing, and placement converged to allow Dr. Smith to operate on Joseph, saving his leg and his life, fully 100 years before this life-saving surgery became accepted as standard procedure.
Dr. Smith was one of the great men of the 19th century, who worked tirelessly to improve medical education. He helped establish 4 medical institutions, including Dartmouth and Yale. At the 200th commemoration of the founding of Yale, Dr. William Henry Welch stated that Dr. Smith, “did more for the general advancement of medical and surgical practice than any of his predecessors or contemporaries in this country.â€
To honor Dr. Nathan Smith, the Joseph Smith Sr. Family Association is hosting the Joseph’s Miracle Run to create a scholarship endowment in behalf of Joseph. This annual scholarship will be granted to a deserving medical student at Dartmouth, and will be a reminder of the great good that charitable contributions like Dr. Smith’s can be in the community. To join with us, or to learn more, please visit: www.JosephsMiracleRun.com.
This was, after all, 1813, in the most rural area of New Hampshire. The infection in Joseph’s bone (osteomyelitis) followed in the wake of an epidemic of typhoid fever that affected all the Smith children. In those days and up until the discovery of antibiotics in this century, osteomyelitis was a devastating problem. Since the days of Hippocrates of ancient Greece, the standard method of treatment had been the simple application of poultices and plasters to the inflamed flesh. This had little effect: when infection occurs in the bone, long segments of the bony shaft die, and the body, growing new bone, encases the dead material within a living layer. Inevitably, the dead bone separates and lies in the center of an abscess cavity, draining continuously or spreading infection to other parts of the body, resulting in death. Usually in the late stages the leg had to be amputated.