Legless women excited Nathaniel Ingersoll Bowditch 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 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
Mcanique Cleste. Nathaniel Ingersoll Bowditch increased his patrimony
by practicing law in Boston. He wrote his father's biography. His
brother was Henry Ingersoll Bowditch , 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.
