Howard A. Kelly (1858-1943)

by Edmund B. Kelly

Howard A. Kelly was born on February 20, 1858, in Camden New Jersey, where his father, a Captain in the Union army, happened to be stationed at that time. However, all his ancestral ties were with the nearby city of Philadelphia where his family on both sides had lived for several generation, having come there from Vermont in colonial days. He was a direct descendent of Michael Hillegas, the first Treasurer of the United States. After the close of the Civil War the family lived in what is now downtown Philadelphia, where he attended Dr. Faires' Classical Institute, a private school for boys, under the supervision of a scholarly old master who followed the discipline of English, rather than the American, schools of the day. Some yeas before his death Dr. Kelly wrote a delightful account of his reminiscences of Dr. Faires' classroom, with quite understandable emphasis on the doctor's collection of birch canes. With warmer weather the family would move to the country near where the city of Chester now stands and here at an early age first became manifest the young boy's interest in various sciences, in those days all loosely grouped under the name of Natural History. There were no doctors of medicine or other scientific men in his immediate ancestry, which was largely comprised of men concerned with the ministry or in business and his scientific tastes seem to have arisen spontaneously. The study of nature attracted him from the first and among his earliest memories was the horrification of his mother when he returned from an expedition to the fields with a squirming collection of turtles and snakes. The clothing of those times did not provide adequate pockets for an acquisition boy and young Kelly solved this problem by buckling his knickers tightly at the knee and filling the space between skin and trouser lag with his captives. Everyone expected him to succumb to some terrible skin poisoning but he seems to have survived without mishap. Insects, reptiles and all small nuisances were generally referred to as "bugs" and young Kelly early declared "bugology" his paramount interest. His ardent hope was to discover some new species and he was greatly worried that all might be found and described before he could get into the field. Doctor John Le Conte, the coleopterist of the Philadelphia Academy of natural Sciences, who was visiting the family in Chester about that time, assured him that some would be left for the next generation.

Coming into adolescence the young man became a persistent visitor at the Academy and took an increasing interest in all its exhibitions and activities, particularly in the field of botany which he thought to make his life's work. This led to an interesting event which first gave impetus to his love of venturing among forests and rivers later in life. About 1875 Doctor Rockroth, a citizen of Philadelphia, in order to study the flora of the region, included him among a group of young men he took on a short camping trip to the Loyalsock River. Not far from the city of Williamsport, it was the heart of the lumbering country in those days. The founder, having lost interest after the first trip, young Kelly and an associate took over the enterprise the next summer on a more permanent and extended basis. As far as records show, this camp was the progenitor of all the innumerable Boys' Camps of subsequent years. Two years later we find young Kelly venturing as far north as Bracebridge, Ontario, then the westernmost extension of the Canadian transcontinental railway. At nearby Orillia he excavated and brought home seventy-five skulls from a battlefield of the great explorer, Champlain, on his farthest foray northward.

In 1877 he entered the medical department of the University of Pennsylvania, not because he was primarily interested in medicine as such but because anatomy and sundry associated scientific studies seemed the closest approach to natural history, in which it was hard to make a living. Here he was in close contact with the great naturalist, Edward Drinker Cope, whom he had known for many years as a teacher and patron through his interest in the reptile kingdom. His medical course had to be interrupted for a year because of failing health from confining work, and young Kelly spent the year 1880-1881 in Colorado as a cowboy, a circumstance which afforded him many opportunities to make observations in the field of nature as well as to practice a limited form of medicine somewhat prematurely. The vast domains of geology, paleontology, and mineralogy were open up to him and he pursued his studies and collections in these fields the rest of his life. In his later years he frequently returned to Colorado and Utah, particularly the region of the great canyons, and in his seventieth year actually organized and equipped an expedition for the decent of the Colorado River, including the Grand Canyon. The enterprise had to be abandoned because of unfavorable flood conditions of that year.

Going still further afield during the nineties, Doctor Kelly and his boon companion, Doctor Brice W. Goldsborough, made several extended trips on horseback through the wilderness of the Mexican state of Oaxaca and finally engaged in a large silver-mining venture, buying up the mining rights in an areas as large as a Maryland County. The young scientist seems to have expended more effort in the study of the local Indians and the mineralogy of the territory than in the affairs of business as the enterprise ended disastrously from the financial point of view. However, he brought back many fine specimens from nature and relics of the ancient Aztec culture. This collection, donated to the Hopkins, contains some of the finest Aztec idols yet recovered.

In the meantime he had taken his medical degree at the University of Pennsylvania in 1882 and thereafter quickly established his reputation as a brilliant young surgeon, ultimately leading to a call to Baltimore in 1889 to join the faculty of the newly forming Johns Hopkins Medical School. He became the first Professor of Gynecology and Obstetrics and retained the former professorship until his retirement in 1919 to the status of Professor Emeritus. The discovery of antisepsis and anesthesia in the seventies opened up the various fields of surgery with the explosive effect of a bomb and with the subsequent rapid development of heretofore-impossible operations and techniques, Doctor Kelly became the father of modern gynecological surgery. His name if associated with those of Doctor William Welch, Doctor William Halstead, and Sir William Osler as the "Big Four" of the Johns Hopkins Medical School, a happy association which gave rise to the first of the modern medical schools as we know them today.

Though heavily burdened by the duties of his professorship and its teaching obligations, in addition to a very large private practice, which brought him patients from all over the world, Doctor Kelly nevertheless found time for his varied interests in Natural History. Research and investigations were rapidly dividing science into its protean branches and it soon became impossible for any one man to remain a master in all of them. However aside from his own field of surgery Doctor Kelly could qualify as an 'amateur expert' in many sciences. Herpetology remained his first love and throughout his life he continued to collect specimens, living and dead, and books, drawings and paintings in this field. For a period of years he kept in his employ the artist, E. F. Deckert, of Florida, and had specimens if snakes and reptiles forwarded to his studio from all over the world. A splendid collection, consisting of several hundred life-size watercolors, resulted from this association. On the porch of his residence in Baltimore and at his country place in Harford County, Doctor Kelly maintained two or three dozen cages for snakes, lizards, and turtles, and kept them supplied through fellow herpetologists and by his own captures in Maryland and Florida. In more recent years he was in the habit of spending a month or six weeks of every winter in the Florida lake region, frequently occupied in searching for snakes. With a loop and forked stick he caught a good number of rattlers and at one time his right thumb was bitten by one of his intended victims. This resulted in preventing his return to surgical work for some months and in the cancellation of his accident policy by a canny insurance company. Among his contributions to herpetology is the beautifully illustrated Snakes of Maryland, published by our own Society.

About 1915 the doctor's interest began to center on the almost limitless field of Mycology. He began collection assiduously in the vicinity of Baltimore and to a greater extent in the deep hemlock and maple woods surrounding his summer camp in Ontario, which offered a marvelously rich soil for the growth of a great variety of fungi. He sent for books and catalogues throughout Europe and soon built a large library on the fleshy fungi, many of the books being extremely rare and valuable. When his library on mycology was finally catalogued in 1938 it contained over ten thousand titles and was considered the finest in America excepting that of Harvard University which had the advantage of a couple of hundred years' head-start. The books and articles were supplemented by an invaluable series of paintings by Louis C. C. Kreiger, a fortunate combination of artist and scientist, whose work is unchallenged as the finest mycological illustration throughout the world.

The second floor of Doctor Kelly's library was set apart for this work and Mr. Kreiger spent some ten years in his employ, completing hundreds of sketches and paintings of fresh material. This rich collection of books, drawings, paintings and specimens, including a series of excellent wax models, was donated by Doctor Kelly to the University of Michigan where there is an active and keenly appreciative Department of Mycology.

In the domain of botany, the doctor's early hobby, he retained his deep interests and made a vital contribution to this science in his volume American Medical Botanists, biographical sketches of doctors of medicine who also left their imprint on botany—Doctor Forsyth (forsythia), Doctor Gardner (gardenia), and others. To a lesser extent but with no less enthusiasm Doctor Kelly studied and collected in the field of lichens and mosses and often entertained scholars in these sciences, as well as mycologists, at his summer camp. Shells, both marine and terrestrial, also held their fascination for him and he collected them assiduously on his Florida trips, donating to various museums and universities his findings, notable among them an ecological collection of 'ligui' (genus Ligus ) from the hammocks of the Everglades. He was appointed honorary Curator of Conchology in the University of Michigan.

Astronomy was one of his major interests. He spent many hours of the night studying the heavens, particularly in Ontario, was widely read and owned a substantial library in this field. At summer camp on Ahmic Lake he set up a six-inch telescope with clockwork and never tired of explaining the glories of the heavenly bodies to family and friend. A devout Christian, Doctor Kelly never failed to see in astronomy and in all nature the handiwork of our Heavenly Father. Meteors held a great fascination for him and he purchased several large and valuable specimens, the finest of which he subsequently donated to Vassar College.

How Doctor Kelly could find time for all these interests, in every one of which he would be considered an expert by ordinary standards, was an amazing mystery to all who knew him. It must be remembered that all this time, besides these avocations, he was engaged in an enormous practice of gynecology and in addition was the foremost developer and exponent of the use of radium in medicine, starting completely without predecessors in the field. He also published over thirty full-sized volumes on surgery of the bladder and genital tract and over five hundred articles on various subjects as well; he largely developed the use of the new weapon in surgery, the electrocautery. He spent many hours in the study of the Bible, wrote numerous articles and collected a vast library of Bible commentaries, read extensively in both Greek and Hebrew; spoke hundreds of times in churches, was a lay reader in the Episcopal Church; engaged actively in campaigns for civic and political reform. His library, very complete in many departments, and requiring six volumes to catalogue it, contained tens of thousands of books, some very old and valuable. It included six four-hundred-year-old parchment missals, beautifully illuminated by hand, which Doctor Kelly presented to Oxford University. Moreover he also raised a family of nine children and gave unstintingly of his time and thought to their development, both material and spiritual. He was no recluse, no scholar withdrawn from the world of affairs; he had a veritable host of friends and constant visitors and his house on Eutaw Place was a "home away from home" for many missionaries from all over the globe.

Always enthusiastically engaged in on or another of his interests, Doctor Kelly was happiest at his Camp in Ontario. He had first selected its site in 1891 while on a canoe-trip down the Magnetawan River and built his first log cabin (Still in use today) in 1897. Thereafter, with the ever-growing family of children and grandchildren, new cabins were added from year to year until the camp grew to resemble a small village. The summers were spent in swimming and canoeing, occasional fishing, and most happily of all in canoe trips up and down river; he was skillful and fearless in shooting the numerous rapids en route. Always on the alert for the infinite phenomena of nature, expressed plant, animal or rock, and the fungi particularly, he collected unceasingly and returned to study his specimens with books and microscope in his cabin.

"Indian Point" was the name given to the camp because the location had been used from time immemorial as a stopping place for the Ojibway Indians traveling between Hudson bay and the Great lakes. Many artifacts unearthed on the point gave supporting evidence of its former use. Of all the places on earth "Indian Point" was dearest to Doctor Kelly's heart. Next in his affections was his library on Eutaw Place where he wrote his books and received his countless friends. Few went away without a blessing and without having gleaned some new knowledge of the wonders of nature. He liked nothing better than to further the aspirations of eager young students and gave freely of his advice and of his treasure. A past President of the Maryland Academy of Sciences, he quickly switched his interest and energy to promulgating the newly formed Natural History Society, which offers more especially to boys and young men inclined toward the field of nature the same opportunities he himself sought so eagerly in youth. He remained a devoted member, patron and trustee of the society until the end of his days.


Originally Printed in the Maryland Naturalist Volume 19, number 2, Spring 1949.