William Thompson Lusk

William Thompson Lusk (May 23, 1838 – June 12, 1897)

Early life Lusk was born and raised in Norwich, Connecticut.

Lusk attended a school run by local Reverend Albert Spooner in preparation for attending Yale College. he enrolled at Yale University in the class of 1859, but left school at the end of his freshman year and studied medicine in Berlin and Heidelberg from 1858 to 1861. He moved through the ranks from private to Assistant Adjutant General by 1863. Unusually for his time, Lusk did not practice the usual custom of vilifying of the Southern soldiers; his letters actually indicate that he respected the Southerners and spoke of "Yankee hordes" invading the Southerners' "splendid plantations". He was promoted to captain on February 24, 1862 (retroactive to January 19, 1862), and resigned from the United States Volunteers on February 28, 1863, He was instead appointed Assistant Adjutant-General (with a rank of Captain) and assigned to the staff of Daniel Tyler on June 26, 1863, but resigned just two months later on September 17, 1863, He was also a staff officer of Isaac I. Stevens until Stevens' death, and he commanded two companies during the Draft Riots of 1863. In 1890, upon the hospital's consolidation with New York University Medical College, Lusk became President of Bellevue Hospital Medical College.

On October 5, 1886, Lusk joined New York Commandery of the Loyal Legion of the United States. including his 1876 paper, Nature, Causes and Prevention of Puerperal Fever, which was one of the first papers to come out in support of germ theory. In 1882, he published The Science and Art of Midwifery. the last of which was practically a rewrite. By some time in 1888, he had already performed three fully successful Caesarian sections within the past year. His second wife also predeceased him, with Maltida dying in 1892. According to his obituary in the New York Times, he left a fortune of over three million dollars to his estate. A significant president of the State's Medical Association (1889) President of Faculty and Professor of Obstetrics and of the Diseases of Women and Children at Bellevue Medical College Consulting Physician to Bellevue Maternity Hospital (1870), Foundling Asylum, Emergency Hospital President of the New York Obstetrical Society (1879) Honorary degree of LL.D. from Yale University (1884)