Reuben Dimond Mussey

Reuben Dimond Mussey, Sr. (June 23, 1780 – June 21, 1866) was an American medical doctor, surgeon, vegetarian and an early opponent of tobacco. He was the fourth president of the American Medical Association.

Biography

Mussey was born on June 23, 1780, in Rockingham County, New Hampshire. He was of French Huguenot descent, and his father, John Mussey, was also a medical doctor. Mussey studied at Dartmouth College and then learned medicine under Nathan Smith. He began the practice of medicine in Essex County, Massachusetts. However, he then went to the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine where he did further medical studies, graduating M.D. in 1809. Among his professors at the University of Pennsylvania was Benjamin Rush. Mussey was elected an Associate Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1811.

He then was a professor at the medical school at Dartmouth College and also at Middlebury College, as well as serving as a medical lecturer at other institutions. Mussey is credited as the first surgeon to tie both carotid arteries in 1829. He lectured on anatomy and surgery at Bowdoin College (1831–1835) and Fairfield Academy (1836–1838). In 1828, a temperance society was founded at Dartmouth. In 1850 he served as president of the American Medical Association.

Mussey died on June 21, 1866, in Boston.

Family

His son Reuben D. Mussey, Jr. was a lawyer and the husband of Ellen Spencer Mussey, the founder of the first law school for females.

Mussey and his first wife Mary Sewall did not have any children. After her death he married Herry Osgood, and they had nine children. In 1832, Mussey "gave up the eating of flesh as an experiment", he did not eat the flesh of land animals for the rest of his life but occasionally consumed fish in 1850. He was a frequent contributor to William Alcott's vegetarian journal Library of Health. His 1862 book Health: Its Friends and Foes included chapters on vegetarianism and on the dangers of tobacco. It was positively reviewed in the Cincinnati Lancet and Observer and The New England Journal of Medicine.

Mussey was a founding member and vice-president of the American Vegetarian Society in the 1850s.

Selected publications

Health: Its Friends and Foes (1862) What Shall I Drink? (1863)