User:Vaticidalprophet/John Stockton Hough

Early life
John Stockton Hough was born on December 5, 1845, in Bucks County, Pennsylvania; sources disagree on whether he was born in the town of Yardley or in Lower Makefield Township. He was the first son of Eleanor ( Stockton) and William Aspy Hough, who had a total of five children together, and a member of the Hough family, a large and respected family in Pennsylvania descended from the assemblyman Richard Hough. Through his mother, he was descended from Richard Stockton, a Founding Father and signatory to the United States Declaration of Independence. William Aspy Hough was a wealthy landowner, and his children grew up in prosperity on his plantation in Ewing Township, New Jersey.

Hough received a classical education at the Trenton Academy in Trenton, New Jersey, before attending prep school at New York State's Fort Edward Collegiate Institute. As a young man, he pursued studies in business, chemistry, and medicine. Hough first studied at the Eastman Business College from 1862 to 1863 before deciding on a career in medicine, taking on the Trenton physician John McKelway as his preceptor. He enrolled simultaneously at the Polytechnic College of Pennsylvania and the University of Pennsylvania in 1864. From the former, he earned a bachelor's degree in chemistry in 1867 and a master's degree in 1870; from the latter, he graduated with his medical degree in 1868.

Medical career, early writing, and skin acquisition
After graduating from medical school in 1868, Hough spent several months teaching chemistry at Central High School in Philadelphia before embarking on a year-long internship at the Philadelphia General Hospital. Widely known as "Old Blockley", the Philadelphia General Hospital was a combination hospital, poorhouse, and insane asylum, serving the crowded city's desperate underclasses; it was a common place of training for the young physicians of the day, described as a place where they "learned their medical skills on paupers' bodies".

While working at the Philadelphia General Hospital, Hough purloined the skin of two patients who died there. Mary Lynch, a widowed and impoverished young Irish émigré, was admitted to the hospital in 1868 with tuberculosis; over the course of six months, her weight fell to 60 lb and she developed severe pains in her limbs. Lynch ultimately died on 16 January 1869 at the age of 28; Hough performed an autopsy, discovering she had acquired a trichinosis infection at the hospital alongside her existing disease. Trichinosis had not previously been reported in Philadelphia, and Hough wrote up his findings for The American Journal of the Medical Sciences. The second patient was a labourer named Thomas McCloskey, another Irish immigrant described by Hough as a man of "intemperate habits". He died of trichinosis a few weeks after Lynch and was mentioned in the same report. Hough removed the skin from McCloskey's wrist, keeping it alongside Lynch's. Hough kept Lynch's skin in a chamber pot and, according to his notes, tanned it himself. Evidence suggests that rather than tanning the skins, he pickled them in his own urine mixed with salt to preserve them, then later sent them to a tannery.

Hough opened a private medical practice in Philadelphia in 1869. He served the city's elite, drawing many of his patients from the Union League men's club, of which he was himself a member. Hough wrote extensively on a range of subjects, publishing papers on medicine, biology, sociology, demography, and political science. Amongst his works from this period were a study of genetic inheritance, in which he concluded sons tend to take after their mothers and daughters after their fathers; an analysis of anomalies of sex development in plants, drawn from a study of flint corn specimens he had personally collected; and an argument that life insurance companies should charge lower insurance premiums to Jewish customers, based on actuarial science finding them to have higher life expectancies.

In his medical career, Hough pursued a diversity of clinical interests. He had a particular interest in reproductive and developmental medicine, with much of both his written work and his personal library's collection focusing on the subject. Around 1870, he designed a vaginal-rectal speculum and a fireproof building material. He was an expert on "human monsters", a contemporary term for severe birth defects. Hough's medical practice was financially successful; combined with his inherited wealth, this granted him the opportunity for expensive avocations, such as travel and the collecting of rare books.

Hough married for the first time on 29 January 1874 to Sarah "Saidee" Macomb Wetherill, daughter of the physician William Wetherill and a member of the colonial Wetherill family. That same year, he closed his medical practice in Philadelphia. From this point, Hough spent the next few years travelling Europe in pursuit of rare books.

Travel, marriages, and bibliophilia
After Hough closed his medical practice, he and his wife Saidee travelled to Europe with the aim of building his collection of rare books. Their only child, a daughter named Frances Eleanor Agrippina Etrusca Hough, was born in Florence in December 1874. Saidee died on 10 January 1875, leaving Hough a widower with a young child. Sources are brief regarding Hough's personal life in this period, and some are unclear on whether he lived in Europe or simply travelled frequently.

During the 1870s and 1880s, Hough visited medical schools, museums, and libraries across Europe and the United States in search of books and manuscripts, particularly medical ones. Hough was particularly interested in incunabula, books from the earliest years of printing in Europe. He compiled desiderata of works that he sent to antiquarians before his visits, inquiring whether they had any of the listed books available; in 1878, he printed and distributed approximately 2,000 such leaflets. He is believed to be the first American physician to study medical incunabula. The original focus of Hough's collection was books on reproduction, but he soon expanded his horizons to include works on the history of medicine and bibliographies of medical works. His travels were extensive; in 1894, it was estimated he had "crossed the Atlantic" fourteen times in his life.

Hough built a vast collection, which he estimated in 1880 to number eight thousand works. Many of the books Hough collected were exceptionally rare; in some cases, his copy was the only one known to exist. Amongst his books was a copy of De Formato Foetu (1600) by the sixteenth-century embryologist Hieronymus Fabricius. An atlas of fetal development, Hough's copy of the book was near-unique for being illustrated with colour folio plates. Few early books with folios survive, and Hough's version of De Formato Foetu is one of only two surviving copies of that book to feature them.

The exact location and timeframe of Hough's voyages are unclear. Some sources describe him as making his residence primarily in London and Paris, while others describe him as travelling frequently with an American base. Discussion of his life between the early 1870s and late 1880s is impressionistic, and it appears his travel lasted throughout that period. In 1887, Hough (aged forty-one) married Edith Reilly, the twenty-year-old daughter of a wealthy miner. He was described at that time as a resident of Trenton, New Jersey; the wedding was held at St. James' Episcopal Church, Manhattan. The couple travelled to Europe weeks after the ceremony, then soon after established their lives in the United States. Frances, aged fourteen by this point, was attending school in Philadelphia.