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Daybooks, ledgers, medical school notebooks, drawings, photographs, sheet music, and biographical records of George Huntington, his descendents and related families.
History and Biography
George Huntington, the physician for whom Huntington’s Chorea or Huntington’s Disease is named, was born April 9, 1850 in East Hampton, N.Y., the son of George Lee Huntington (1811-1881) and Mary Hoogland Huntington. Both Huntington’s father and his grandfather, Abel (1778-1858), were physicians in East Hampton.
Huntington attended the Clinton Academy in his native town and was enrolled at the College of Physicians and Surgeons (P&S) of Columbia College, 1868-1871. He finished his medical studies at P&S in February 1871 with an inaugural thesis on opium. Because he was not yet 21 at the time, Huntington’s diploma was not actually awarded until June 1872, though he was listed in the College records as a member of the Class of 1871. Shortly thereafter he settled in Pomeroy, Ohio, where he began practicing medicine.
While in Ohio, Huntington presented a paper entitled “On Chorea” to the Meigs and Mason Academy of Medicine in Middleport on February 15, 1872. In it, Huntington discussed the more common form of chorea, often found in children. He then went on to describe the “form of the disease which exists, so far as I know, almost exclusively on the east end of Long Island…The hereditary chorea, as I shall call it, is confined to certain and fortunately a few families, and has been transmitted to them, an heirloom from generations away back in the dim past.”
Based on his study of the casebooks of his father and grandfather and on his own observations, Huntington deduced the distinguishing characteristics of this rarer form of chorea: “1. Its hereditary nature. 2. A tendency to insanity and suicide. 3. Its manifesting itself as a grave disease only in adult life.” Huntington pointed out that if the disease skipped a generation then it would never again manifest itself in the descendents of the original sufferer: “Unstable and whimsical as the disease may be in other respects, in this it is firm, it never skips a generation to again manifest itself in another; once having yielded its claims, it never regains them.”
Published in the April 15, 1872 issue of Philadelphia’s Medical and Surgical Reporter, Huntington’s report was so lucid, accurate and poetic that the disease has come to bear his name. His insight into the rules of heredity predates by a generation the rediscovery of Mendel’s laws of genetic transmission.
Huntington married Mary Heckard of Pomeroy in Oct. 1874. They had six children, five of whom survived into adulthood. The couple returned to New York soon after and settled in LaGrangeville, Dutchess County. Huntington practiced in this rural community until 1901 when ill health led him move to Asheville, N.C. When his health recovered in 1903, he returned to Dutchess County, settling in Hopewell Junction, where he practiced until 1914 when poor health forced him to retire.
Huntington was elected president of the Dutchess County Medical Society in 1887 and served as a New York State Commissioner in Lunacy for Dutchess County. He was an honorary member of the Brooklyn Neurological Society.
George Huntington died on March 3, 1916 of pneumonia at the home of his son, Dr. Edwin H. Huntington, in Cairo, N.Y.
Organization
Organized in eight series:
I. Daybooks and Ledgers
II. Medical School Notebooks
III. Papers and Addresses
IV. Miscellaneous Family Material
V. Drawings
VI. Stewart Family Correspondence
VII. Photographs
VIII. Oversize Items.
The papers include daybooks, ledgers, medical school notebooks, drawings, photographs, sheet music, and biographical records of George Huntington, his descendents and related families.
The daybooks and ledgers, 1871-1914 (with gaps), cover a substantial portion of Huntington’s forty year career as a physician largely in LaGrangeville and Hopewell Junction, Dutchess County, N.Y. and give a good picture of the daily routine of a physician practicing in the rural U.S. in the late 19th century. While the patient’s illness is rarely noted, the entries usually list the reason for each visit (“obstetrical,” “bot. medicine”). Three of the ledgers are located in Series VIII, Oversize Items.
The notebooks from Huntington’s studies at the College of Physicians & Surgeons (P&S) of Columbia College record lectures in medicine, surgery, obstetrics, and pharmacology given by Alonzo Clark, Thomas Markoe, James McLane, Willard Parker, and T. Gaillard Thomas. Huntington is particularly meticulous about noting the name of the lecturer, the subject of the lecture, and its date and time. The papers also include his medical school inaugural thesis and two papers he gave later in life on Huntington’s chorea.
Huntington was a talented amateur artist and caricaturist and the papers include about 17 pencil and ink drawings by him (Box 5:10-27), as well as another 14 color drawings by an unidentified artist (Box 5: 28-29, Box 6: 1-12). There are also a few photographs of Huntington and many more of his children, grandchildren and related families dating from the late 19th into the mid-20th century.
While the papers contain no correspondence by Huntington or his family, there are several folders of letters of Robert and Mary Stewart of Washington, D.C. and Brooklyn, N.Y., 1872-1933. Their daughter, Marjorie, married George Huntington’s son, Charles Gardiner Huntington, in 1906.
Subject Headings and Related Records
Administrative Information
Purchased from William Huntington, great-great-grandson of George Huntington by descent from his son Charles G. Huntington, 2011 (acc.#2011.008; acc.#2013.018); 1874-1876 ledger purchased at auction at Swann Galleries, New York, NY, April 2018 (acc. #2018.022).
Removals: A copy of William Cullen’s Synopsis and Nosology: Being an Arrangement and Definition of Diseases (Springfield, MA: Edward Gray for Nathaniel Patten, 1793) with the bookplate of George L. Huntington and the signature of Abel Huntington, has been added to the Health Sciences Library’s rare book collection. A copy of Rensselaer Bentley’s Introduction to the Pictorial Reader… (New York: Saxton & Miles, 1845) was transferred to Columbia’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
Papers processed and finding aid written by Stephen E. Novak, June 2011.