Transactions of the Maine Medical Association, 1883, Vol. VIII, Part I, pp. 140-143.

ARTICLE XVI

Biographical Sketch of WILLIAM WARREN GREENE, M.D.,
of Portland.
By Frederic Henry Gerrish, M.D., of Portland.

     WILLIAM WARREN GREENE  was born in North Waterford, Oxford County, Maine, on the 1st of March, 1831.  His father was JACOB HOLT GREENE, a man of rugged physical and intellectual build, an independent thinker, with marked inventive talent and a keen sense of justice, which made him an outspoken anti-slavery man at a period when it required courage to advocate views which are now universally entertained.  His mother was SARAH WALKER FRYE,  a descendent of the family which gave its name to the town of Fryeburg.  When he was nine years old, he was placed under the instruction of his relative, the late Rev. Dr. WILLIAM WARREN, for whom he was named.  At sixteen he began to teach, and for several winters had charge of district schools in Bethel and in his native town, where he opened the first high school that Waterford ever had.  From 1848 to 1851, he was a student at Bethel Academy.  His medical studies were prosecuted under the preceptorship of the late Dr. SETH C. HUNKINS, and he attended lectures at the Berkshire Medical College, Pittsfield, Mass., and the medical department of the University of Michigan, graduating with great credit from the latter institution in 1855.  A year or two after this, he was offered the demonstratorship of anatomy from his Alma Mater; but being dependent upon his professional work for his income, he was obliged to decline the position, which brought no pay but honor.  Immediately after graduating, he began his practice in his old home, but removed to the town of Gray after two and a half years.  In the fall of 1862, he served two months as volunteer surgeon in the Federal army.

     His old teachers in the Berkshire College – some of them also his instructors in Ann Arbor – had kept track of the promising student; and, a vacancy occurring in the chair of theory and practice of medicine, the place was tendered him.  He at once accepted, and removed to Pittsfield in November, 1862; but he was soon transferred to the chair of surgery, for which his natural endowments and cherished tastes peculiarly fitted him, and this position he filled until the close of his connection with the institution in 1868.  In the autumn of 1865, the professorship of surgery in the Medical School of Maine was made vacant by the death of Dr. D. S. CONANT, and Dr. GREENE was called to it, giving his first course here in 1866.  Excepting two years, in which ill-health necessitated the appointment of temporary substitutes, he was given every surgical course in this school since that time.  In the winter of 1867-68, he has Professor of Surgery in the University of Michigan, but resigned when the well-known homeopathic difficulty arose.

     In 1868, he removed from Pittsfield to Portland.  Already an active member of the Maine Medical Association, of the Massachusetts Medical Society, and of various other medical organizations, in 1870 he received the marked distinction of an election to honorary membership in the Medical Society of the State of New York.  From 1872 to 1874, he was Professor of Surgery in the Long Island College Hospital, Brooklyn, N.Y.; in this, as in every other school with which he was connected, winning easy recognition as a clear, forcible and charming lecturer, and a clinical teacher of exceptional power.  In 1880, he was elected President of the Maine Medical Association, and made his service memorable by his successful efforts to secure the passage of an anatomical bill by the State Legislature.  His inaugural address was probably  his most scholarly production.

     Dr. GREENE was twice married; in 1855, to Miss LIZZIE CARLETON, of Waterford, who died in 1860, without living issue; and in 1861, to Miss LIZZIE A. LAWRENCE, of Pownal, who died in 1876.  Two children survive him, a son of twenty-one, and a daughter of twelve years of age.  He had three brothers, all younger than himself: JACOB LYMAN, President of the Connecticut Life Insurance Company; GEORGE FRYE, who resides on the old homestead; and SAMUEL THOMAS, who is a teacher in Belleville, Ontario.  He had one sister, who died in 1878.

     In July, 1881, he went to England to attend the meetings of the International Medical Congress.  On the passage home on the steamer Parthia, he was suddenly attacked with complete suppression of urine, and died in a uremic convulsion, after an illness of hardly twenty-four hours.  The facilities on board the vessel were not such as to permit the preservation of the body until it could be brought to land, and burial took place on the 10th of September, the day of his death.

     For many years, Dr. GREENE’S work, both as practitioner and teacher, was almost exclusively in the department of surgery, and in this branch of medicine he had the leading practice in Eastern New England.  He was unquestionably a genius.  Few men possess his diagnostic skill, fewer still his marvelous facility with the knife; indeed, as an operator, it is difficult to conceive of his superior.  His knowledge of anatomy was so accurate, and his grace, steadiness and rapidity so striking, as to make the most difficult operation appear simple and easy.  His daring was equal to his dexterity, and, while yet a young man in the profession, he performed the bold operation which, more than anything else, will hand his name down to posterity.  This was the successful removal of a large bronchocele, in 1856, from a patient whose case had been pronounced hopeless by a number of able surgeons.

     Several other equally satisfactory results in formidable goitre operations were sufficient to establish the propriety of the procedure in certain cases, and to evoke from a leading surgical authority an admission to this effect, although, in a previous edition, he had declared that “no honest and sensible surgeon would ever engage in this horrid butchery.”  But, while the distant future may remember him solely in connection with this brilliant contribution to legitimate surgery, the present generation of medical men, so many of whom bear his signature upon their diplomas, will associate with his name the idea of a dignified and impressive, but delightful and magnetic presence; a voice whose sweetness attracted, and whose eloquence enchained; a mind of generous breadth, wonderfully alert and fertile in ingenious expedients, and a hand under whose delicate touch the lurking mysteries of disease came forth from their concealment.

     The various communities in which he exercised his art with such success will long mourn for him as for one whose place cannot be supplied, and the benedictions of the multitude, which almost worshiped him for changing their misery to joy, will follow him to his ocean grave.  The medical profession of his native State with gratitude acknowledges that to him, more than to any other in its ranks, it owes progress in knowledge, incentive to activity, and increase of achievement.