Hartford on the Brain

Start at 333 North Steele Road

Suzanne Corkin (née Hammond) was born at Hartford Hospital and was an only child. Dr. Corkin grew up in West Hartford, directly across the street from William Scoville, at 333 North Steele Rd, and was best friends with his daughter, Alison Scoville Dittrich. The two went to school together from third grade until college and stayed very close after that. Dr. Corkin went to the Oxford School in West Hartford. She went to college at Smith College and then received her PhD from McGill University. While there, she read an article about Henry Molaison.  Mr. Molaison received psychosurgery at Hartford Hospital to relieve seizures and was left with a profound memory deficit.  You can learn more about him and the surgery here.  Her dissertation advisor, Brenda Milner, asked if she would like to work with him. Her dissertation was entitled “Somesthetic function after focal cerebral damage” which examined Mr. Molaison’s sense of touch. In 1964 she began working at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the lab of Hans-Lukas Teuber. When he died, she became the director of the lab. She devoted her career to working with Mr. Molaison and to studying how human memory works and the brain substrates of memory in a variety of populations.  She discovered that Mr. Molaison had profound short-term memory loss.  He could remember very little from after the time of the surgery for the rest of his life.  According to Dr. Corkin: If you talked to him in the afternoon and said, “Have you had lunch?,” he would say, “I don’t know” or “I guess so,” but he would not remember what he had had. And if you asked, “What was your last meal?,” he wouldn’t know what it was.

She was an early user of functional imaging like MRI and fMRI to help understand how memory works. She published over 150 research articles and was author or co-author of 10 books. She received a MERIT award from the National Institutes of Health and the Baltes Distinguished Research Achievement Award from the American Psychological Association, Division on Aging. She also became a committed advocate for increasing women in science, giving talks on the topic, and received the Brain and Cognitive Sciences Undergraduate Advising Award at MIT. After her death, a group of former students published this tribute to her.

We were fortunate to have Dr. Corkin speak at Trinity College. You can watch the full talk here “The Amnesic Patient HM: A Half Century of Learning About Memory.”

Here is a clip where she talks about whether Mr. Molaison has a sense of self.

Short-Corkin-Clip

Suzanne Corkin Obituary

After her death, Dr. Scoville’s grandson, Luke Dittrich wrote a book Patient H.M.: A Story of Memory, Madness, and Family Secrets. In it he claimed that Dr. Corkin tried to hide the existence of a lesion in the orbitofrontal lobe and that she shredded data to cover errors. This was refuted in a letter to the New York Times signed by over 200 scientists, and in the published work. In fact, she had published data that she claimed suggested an orbitofrontal lesion in 1983 (Eichenbaum et al., 1983).

In Defense of Suzanne Corkin

 

Directly across the street at 334 North Steele Road was the home of William Beecher Scoville, the surgeon who performed the surgery on Mr. Molaison.

William Beecher Scoville established the Department of Neurosurgery at Hartford Hospital in 1939. William Beecher Scoville was a descendent of Harriet Beecher Stowe. He was born in Philadelphia in 1905 to Samuel and Katherine Gallaudet (Trumbull) Scoville. His mother was a descendant of Thomas Gallaudet. He attended Loomis School, received his undergraduate degree at Yale University and his medical degree at the University of Pennsylvania. His first wife was Emily Learned Scoville and they had three children that they raised at 334 North Steele Road in West Hartford, Barrett, Alison, and Peter. In 1941 he developed the first neurosurgery residency program in Connecticut. His students referred to him as “Wild Bill.” ‘Bill drove fast, lived hard and operated where angels feared to tread,” said Dr. David Crombie, former chief of surgery at Hartford Hospital who met Scoville in the early 1960s as an intern at the hospital and became friends with his son. Scoville’s wife had schizophrenia and this may have played a role in his desire to find surgical options for treating mental illnesses. In the book written by his grandson, Luke Dittrick, Dittrick speculates that Dr. Scoville may have actually performed surgery on his wife, Emily Learned Scoville.

In addition to the surgery on Mr. Molaison, Dr. Scoville is known for a coiled aneurysm clip that he invented. His second marriage was to Helene Deniau Scoville, with whom he had two children Sophie and William. Dr. Scoville’s brother was Rev. Gordon Scoville, the founding pastor of Westminster Presbyterian Church in West Hartford. Dr. Scoville had a life-long interest in cars and was known for driving his red Jaguar or motorcycle on Steele Road and tinkering with cars in his spare time. He was an early proponent for motorcycle helmets but never wore one himself. Scoville was killed in 1984, at the age of 78, when he backed up his car on the highway to get to an exit he had missed.

 

 

 

 

Start at the American School for the Deaf on 139 North Main Street. You can learn more about the American School for the Deaf here in this video from the West Hartford Historical Center.

 

Turn right (south) on North Main Street and continue to Fern Street.  Turn right on Fern Street until you come to Walden Street.  218 Walden was the home of Alan Hart.

Alan Hart was a professor in psychology at the University of Hartford, he gave countless community lectures, and he published an article in the Hartford Courant advocating against racism as the city grew more diverse. During his time in Hartford, he played a very important role in the medical response to tuberculosis, and he worked for the state tuberculosis commission. He is the first known person to undergo gender affirming surgery in 1917 in the United States, and most likely, his was the first known gender affirming surgery, period. These two experiences are deeply intertwined, both in Hart’s own lived experience and the histories of gender affirming care and infectious diseases. Alan Hart made concerted efforts throughout his life to distance himself from the life he lived before his gender affirming surgery. Thus, we can ask, what are the ethics of digging so deeply into Hart’s life, pre-transition, when he so clearly wanted to separate himself from it? That said, Alan was born in Kansas, and he moved frequently. He found himself between New York and Stanford University for his undergrad, in Oregon for medical school, and in Hartford in 1947. Much of Alan’s movement across the states was more than a search for job opportunities. Hart intentionally distanced himself from New York and other places where his gender left him victimized at the hands of colleagues looking to reduce his credibility, and at the hands of a society which was equally unwelcome. For Alan, leaving the state of New York was more akin to an act of necessary escape, which frames Hartford as a place of safety in that era of the mid 20th century. Hart was also affected by the period’s concerns of gender and sense of place in biology. Alan’s identity as a man played an important role in his acceptance into the field of medicine. It often came down to a piece of paper signed by Alan Hart’s professor-turned-psychiatrist, J. Allen Gilbert.

Gilbert published a case study of Hart in 1920 titled “Homo-sexuality and its Treatment”. He emphasizes Hart’s childhood as “proof” of the inborn nature of his gender/sexuality deviancy; this is reflective of the switch occurring during this era of an acts-based model of sexuality to an identity-based model. Hart did not come to Gilbert out of concern for his gender/sexuality; he had no problem with it; “[he] knew nothing of psychopathy and did not realize that [his] own condition was abnormal”. He sought Gilbert’s help for a phobia of a particular noise – which Gilbert of course attributed to his “homosexuality”. Gilbert does not entirely pathologize Hart. For what it’s worth, he did allow the hysterectomy to go forward (instead of attempting to “cure” the gender deviance) and commended Alan’s bravery and respectability.

After the initial controversy about his identity at the San Francisco hospital, it was a document signed by Dr. Gilbert that made the media accept his manhood; it is notable that it was not his own identification that cemented the legitimacy of his gender, but an official statement from the medical field.

In the 1920s, Hart conducted groundbreaking research on tuberculosis, utilizing X-ray technology for early detection. In 1948, Hart was appointed director of hospitalization and rehabilitation for the Connecticut State Tuberculosis Commission. As in Idaho, Hart took charge of a massive statewide X-ray screening program for TB, emphasizing the importance of early detection and treatment. He held this position for the rest of his life, and is credited with helping contain the spread of tuberculosis in Connecticut.  Hart was an advocate for public health in many ways beyond his impressive research.  He advocated for reforms in healthcare, including socialized medicine.  Hart’s role as a pioneer in radiology revolutionized medical diagnostics, and in the case of the diagnosis and treatment of tuberculosis, Alan’s work has had waves of importance for the LGBTQ+ community throughout the AIDS crisis. Of the 1.3 Million people who died of tuberculosis in the past year, just under two hundred thousand were people who also had HIV, putting them at an increased vulnerability to TB. Alan Hart’s contributions saved countless lives. In Hartford, in the LGBTQ+ community, and throughout the world.

“The ugly things that have grown up in medicine are the result of the ugliness and falsity of society as a whole, of our American preoccupation with success and making money, of our concentration of effort on the production of things rather than their use for a fuller human life. These things are not the fault of the individual physician; and neither can they be remedied by him. So long as the American people are permeated with the spirit of ‘I’m going to get mine, no matter how,’ just so long will that attitude filter into all the professions; doctors are people first and are affected by the current ideals just as other people are.” –Alan Hart

Learn more here:

Trailblazing Transgender Doctor Saved Countless Lives, Scientific American, June, 10 2021

And here:

Alan L. Hart: Pioneer in Medicine and Transgender History

 

 

 

 

Roger Sperry once lived at 39 Robin Road.

Roger Wolcott Sperry was born August 20, 1913 to Francis Bushnell and Florence Kraemer Sperry. His father died when he was 11 and he moved with his mother and brother to the Elmwood section of West Hartford. His mother became the assistant to the principal at Hall High School which Dr. Sperry would attend.  In his autobiography he notes that he collected and raised large American moths in grade school, that he ran a trap line and collected live wild pets during junior high school years and that he was a three-letter man in varsity athletics in high school and college (baseball, basketball, and track).  

He attended Oberlin College on a 4 year Amos C. Miller Scholarship originally intending to go into coaching.  He received an AB in English in 1935.  But he had become interested in Psychology, however, after a course in Introduction to Psychology with Professor Raymond Stetson, and so he stayed on 2 years at Oberlin to earn an MA in Psychology, under Professor Stetson and then an additional third at Oberlin to prepare for a switch to Zoology for Ph.D. work under Professor Paul A. Weiss at the University of Chicago. After receiving the Ph.D. at Chicago in 1941, he did a year of postdoctoral research as a National Research Council Fellow at Harvard University under Professor Karl S. Lashley.

He was a Biology research fellow at Harvard University, at Yerkes Laboratories of Primate Biology (1942-46); Assistant professor, Department of Anatomy, University of Chicago (1946-52); Associate professor of psychology, University of Chicago (1952-53); Section Chief, Neurological Diseases and Blindness, National Institutes of Health (1952-53); Hixon professor of psychobiology, California Institute of Technology (1954-1994).  He received numerous awards besides the Nobel, including being Elected American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1963), the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award, American Psychological Association (1971); Honorary Doctor of Science degree, Cambridge University (1972); Ralph Gerard Award of the Society of Neurosciences (1979); and the American Academy of Achievement Golden Plate Award (1980)

He married Norma Gay Deupree, December 28, 1949. They had one son, Glenn Michael (Tad), born October 13, 1953 and one daughter, Janeth Hope, born August 18, 1963. He notes in his autobiography that through middle life he continued evening and weekend diversionary activities including sculpture, ceramics, figure drawing, sports, American folk dance, boating, fishing, snorkeling, water colors, and collecting unusual fossils – among which he had a contender for the world’s 3rd largest ammonite.

He described his work as occurring in four “turnarounds” which were: 1. Nerve regeneration & chemo-affinity studies; 2. Studies involving equi-potentiality; 3. Split-brain studies; and 4. Consciousness and values.  

Sperry studied optic nerve regeneration and developed the chemoaffinity hypothesis. The chemoaffinity hypothesis stated that axons, the long fiber-like part of neurons, connect to their target cells through special chemical markers. That challenged the previously accepted resonance principle of neuronal connection.

In 1981 he won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine “for his discoveries concerning the functional specialization of the cerebral hemispheres.”  He is the only person with a degree in Psychology to have won this prize

image from Nature.com

In a series of important studies he was able to demonstrate the differences in the functioning between the left and right hemispheres of the brain.  Using people who had had the corpus callosum (the fiber tract that connects the two hemispheres) severed to help treat seizure disorder, he would present information to either the right or the left visual field.  He demonstrated, among other things, that for most right-handed people the majority of language functions are mediated by the left hemisphere of the brain.  When information was presented to the right visual field (left brain), the person could name the object, however when presented to the left visual field (right brain) they could not.  Fascinatingly, however, despite saying they saw nothing, they could draw the object with their left hand.

Summing up his split-brain studies he wrote: “When the brain is whole, the unified consciousness of the left and right hemispheres adds up to more than the individual properties of the separate hemispheres.”

In the final phase, he wrote about human values.  In his paper “Science and the Problem of Values” he states “the trends toward disaster in today’s world stem mainly from the fact that while man has been acquiring new, almost godlike, powers of control over nature , he has continued to wield these same powers with a relatively shortsighted, most ungodlike set of values.” These writings led to the development of the Declaration of Human Responsibilities by a group of distinguished scientists from around the world. The document is being considered by the United Nations as the step following the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Human Rights.

He died in 1994 of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig’s disease). You can see a short documentary on Sperry here

and a discussion of his split-brain work by his student Michael Gazzaniga here with some original footage. 

The neuroscience building at Oberlin is named after him.

“Before brains there was no color or sound in the universe, nor was there any flavor or aroma and probably little sense and no feeling or emotion.”—Roger Sperry

 

Continue up Robin Road and turn right on Fern St.  In two blocks you will see the elementary school named for Edward Morley on your right.  

Continue on Fern St. to Prospect Avenue. 

On the NW corner (what is now 777 Prospect) is where Yung Wing’s house once stood.  You can learn more about him by using the Cedar Hill Cemetery information-dial (860) 760-9979 and press #21, or by watching this video from the West Hartford Historical Society.

Yung Wing was born in 1828 in China and died in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1912. As a child in China his father sent him to a missionary school.  At this school he met a minister from Connecticut, S.R. Brown, who brought Yung Wing back with him in 1847.  He attended the Monson Academy in Massachusetts and, in 1854, graduated from Yale University, becoming the first Chinese student to graduate from a university in the United States. He obtained U.S. citizenship at this time.  Yung Wing wanted to improve engineering and infrastructure in China. With the help of funding from the Chinese government and the establishment of the 1868 Burlingame Treaty, which allowed Chinese residents to have rights in the United States, he founded The Chinese Education Mission.

In 1872, 30 students arrived in Hartford, Connecticut, where they stayed with host families, were immersed in American culture, and attended local public schools, including Hartford Public High School. These students then went on to attend many prestigious U.S. universities. The plan was for them to return to China after their education and 15 years in the country.  The educational Mission’s main office was on Collins Street in Hartford.

Yung Wing met Mary Kellogg from Avon who had become involved in helping to educate some of the students.  They married on February 24, 1875 and they had two children. They lived for a time in a mansion on the corner of Fern Street and Prospect Avenue.  Mary Kellogg became Yung Wing’s assistant and was involved in the running of the Mission.  Sadly, she died in 1996 of what was then called Bright’s disease but is now known as acute glomerular nephritis.  She was 35 years old and their sons were 10 and 7 at the time of her death.

The Mission ended when when the first prospective group of students to Annapolis and West Point were refused entrance. This represented a breech on the part of the United States of the Bulingame Treaty.  As a result, the Chinese government withdrew support for the Mission and ordered the students and Yung to return to China. The students returned home in 1881, and Yung Wing returned to China. Despite the closing of the school,  students who returned to China became educators, engineers, and physicians.  However, as discrimination and bigotry grew in the United States, The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, one of the first laws restricting immigration into the United States, was passed. The United States revoked Yung Wing’s citizenship, and all remaining students were forced to return to China.

In the summer of 1898, a coup by the Empress Dowager Cixi reacted to modernization reforms, and the leaders of the reforms were arrested and executed. Yung Wing fled to British Hong Kong from Shanghai.

Yung returned to America in 1902 to see his younger son graduate from Yale and remained in the country with no legal status, living with his sons and dying at his home in Hartford in 1912.  He is buried at Cedar Hill Cemetery in Section 10, Lot 6.

“The race prejudice against the Chinese was so rampant and rank that not only my application for the students to gain entrance to Annapolis and West Point was treated with cold indifference and scornful hauteur, but the Burlingame Treaty of 1868 was, without the least provocation, and contrary to all diplomatic precedents and common decency, trampled underfoot unceremoniously and wantonly, and set aside as though no such treaty had ever existed, in order to make way for those acts of congressional discrimination against Chinese immigration which were pressed for immediate enactment.”–Yung Wing

Hartford Courant, January 30, 1906, Page 1 details some of the discrimination he encountered

You can learn more here:

Yung Wing’s Dream: The Chinese Educational Mission, 1872-1881

and here:

Yung Wing

 

 

 

Old North Cemetery

Begin this tour in the Old North Cemetery at 1821 Main Street.  This cemetery was created in 1807.  Among the notable people buried here are Frederick Law Olmstead and Horace Bushnell.

Old North Cemetery is where Alice Cogswell  and her father Dr. Mason Cogswell are buried Section A / Lot 47.

Alice Cogswell was born August 31, 1805, in Hartford Connecticut. At the age of two she became ill and lost her hearing as a result. The illness is unknown but is believed to have been meningitis. Her family had very little communication with her at this point, but her neighbor Thomas Gallaudet noticed her intelligence when she was nine years old. Gallaudet noticed that Alice had the ability to spell words out in the dirt when they were playing one day. Alice’s father, Mason F. Cogswell, was thrilled by Gallaudet’s discovery. Mason raised money and used his connections to send Gallaudet to Europe to research the best strategies for deaf education. Gallaudet returned to Connecticut with Laurent Clerc, a deaf teacher. Gallaudet opened the American School for the Deaf in 1817, originally named the American Asylum for the Education and Instruction of Deaf and Dumb Persons, where Alice was one of first students to attend. Following her graduation in 1824, Alice Cogswell travelled widely to raise awareness about the reality of deafness and the need for a system of education for deaf people. She died at age 25 in 1830, just 13 days after the death of her father.

https://www.google.com/books/edition/Tribute_to_Gallaudet/QFgCn73ROF8C?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=%22Alice+Cogswell,+the+third+daughter+of+Dr.+Mason+F.+and+Mrs.+Mary+A.%22&pg=PA67&printsec=frontcover

https://www.disabilitymuseum.org/dhm/lib/detail.html?id=698

 

Twenty-six other students of the American School for the Deaf (ASD) are buried here, marked only by a “shaft.”  The shaft has their names and home towns engraved on the sides.  Section G around Lot 920.

The students are:

Mary Armor, GA – died of consumption in 1864 – age 23
George Ball, MA – died of typhus in 1850 – age 13
Elizabeth Blizzard, GA – cause of death not listed in 1839 – age 17
Theodore Brightman, MA – fell from a swing in 1843 – age 12
Donald Campbell, Nova Scotia – died of lung fever in 1846 – age 16
P. Jane Davison, VT – died of typhoid fever in 1847 – age 16
Benjamin Dawson, NH – killed walking on RR tracks in 1857 – age 12 (with Parker, see below)
James Fennell, ME – died of fever in 1860 – age 18
Frances Graham, NH – died of dropsy in 1848 – age 15
Caroline Hammett, MA – died of lung fever in 1857 – age 16
Cora Hilton, ME – disease not listed in 1879 – age 11
Henry Hodgdon, MA – cause of death not listed in 1879 – age 10
Almira Kilbourn, NH – died of consumption in 1846 – age 13
Catharine Luce, MA – died of lung fever in 1857 – age 12
John Parker, MA – killed walking on RR tracks in 1857 – age 13 (with Dawson, above)
Sally Perkins, ME – died from measles in 1841 – age 16
Drusilla Sloan, SC – died from dysentery in 1849 – age 16 (sister of Ellen, below)
Ellen Sloan, SC – died from dysentery in 1849 – age 17 (the sisters died a few hours apart)
Samuel Smart, NH – died of consumption in 1845 – age 19
Charles Smith, NH – died of lung fever in 1847 – age 20
Joseph Smith, ME – died of typhoid pneumonia in 1874 – age 14
Eliza Standley, ME – died of inflammation of the lungs in 1852 – age 24
Mary Jane Stevenson, NH – died of pulmonary disease in 1852 – age 12
William Turner, MA – died of erysipelas in 1849 – age 12
Helen Wakefield, ME – died of inflammation of the lungs in 1852 – age 18
Beulah Wentworth, VT – died of congestive fever in 1842 – age 12

Also buried in ASD’s plot is the school’s Assistant Steward, Salmon Crossett, who died on Christmas day in 1883. Prior to his death he requested that he be buried with the deaf students in ASD’s plot.

All the students listed were out-of-state borders. The time and cost of transportation in those days made it impractical to send the bodies back to their home states.

The American School for the Deaf was founded in 1817 by Mason Cogswell and Thomas Gallaudet.  It was the first permanent school for the deaf in the United States.

Many thanks to Jean Linderman at the Cogswell Heritage House for this information.

 

Anna Louise James’ parents are also buried here, but the marker has gone missing Section I / Lot 1349.

 

Eli Todd is buried here. Section F / Lot 608.

Eli Todd was the first Director of the Institute of Living.  His sister Eunice died by suicide after many years of depression and many attempts at treatment. This led him to the belief that depression was a disease that should be treated medically. He remained the director until 1833. You can learn more about him here.

https://connecticuthistory.org/medical-pioneer-eli-todd-born/

 

Mary Townsend Seymour is buried here.

 

Across the street from the cemetery at 1750 Main Street is the site of the Arsenal School where Anna Louise James went to school. Go south on Main Street and take a right on Mather Street and then a left on Green and a right on Winter. Find 6 Winter Street where Anna Louise James was born.

Anna Louise James was born on January 19, 1886, in Hartford to Willis Samuel James and Anna Houston, the eight of eleven children​​. Willis Samuel James was a Virginia plantation slave who escaped at age 16 and followed the underground railroad to Connecticut. She attended the Arsenal Elementary School in Hartford and then the family moved to Old Saybrook after her mother died when Ms James was 8 years old. Ms. James became, in 1908, the first African American woman to graduate from the Brooklyn College of Pharmacy in New York and the only woman in her class. She operated a drugstore in Hartford until 1911, when she went to work for her brother-in-law at his pharmacy in Old Saybrook, making her the first Black woman pharmacist in Connecticut. The Connecticut Pharmaceutical Association, however, rejected her application for membership because she was a woman and suggested she join the women’s auxiliary. She persisted, stating “there were pharmacists in my family as long as I can remember” In 1917, Anna took over the pharmacy and renamed it James Pharmacy. She maintained the pharmacy until 1967. With the passage of the 19th amendment to the US Constitution in 1920 she became one of the first women to register to vote. In 1974 the Veterans of Foreign Wars honored her as Citizen of the Year, noting her generosity, hospitality, and compassion. You can learn more about her here.

Head right at the end of Winter Street and left on Mather.  Turn right on Garden Street.  Continue three blocks to Capen Street and turn right on Capen.  201 Capen is the site of the clinic run by Dr. Henry Patrick Clay Arms.

Patrick Henry Clay Arms was the first licensed Black physician in Hartford and first African American to run for Mayor in Hartford. He was born in Bridgeport in 1867, his father was from Cuba and his mother from South America. He graduated from Howard University in 1890 and Columbia University Medical School in 1894. He practiced medicine in Hartford for 40 years at 201 Capen Street and then 94 Walnut Street. He was the founder of Arms Council 1697, Independent Order of Luke, which was a local benefit society.  He married Anna Cross in 1903 and they had two children, Elvira Arms and Jarvis Henry Arms.

When the stage play The Clansman was scheduled for Hartford in 1906, Dr. Arms argued that if a play like George Bernard Shaw’s Mrs. Warren’s Profession would be excluded on moral grounds, the same standard should apply to The Clansman. After a Hartford protest by a gropu of black and white clergy, Mayor Henney agreed to travel to Manhattan and see the play for himself. He watched a performance on December 5, 1906. When he returned to Hartford, the mayor admitted there were “some uncomplimentary allusions to the negro that were liberally applauded.” However, even given that, Henney proclaimed there was nothing immoral in the play’s content. The show premiered as scheduled at Parson’s Theater.

On December 28, 1907 Dr. Arms had a call out on Farmington Ave at 3:00 am. On his way out a Police Officer David Mairson stopped him and “made him give an account of himself.” Dr. Arms brought charges against the officer. The officer was found “guilty of nothing but the faithful performance of his duties and the commissioners told him to do the same thing again under similar circumstances.” Hartford Courant, January 7, 1908

You can learn more about him here:

Hartford Challenges “The Birth of a Nation”

 

He died in 1934 and is buried at Zion Hill Cemetery. His wife Anna (Cross) Arms is also buried there.

Spring Grove Cemetery

You should now be at Spring Grove Cemetery which extends to the Old North Cemetery and whose entrance is at 2035 Main St.

Laurent and Elizabeth Clerc are buried here.  Laurent Clerc was born in 1785 in France. He was deaf and enrolled in the first public school for the deaf in the world, which was in France. As an adult he was demonstrating sign language in London and his demonstration was seen by Thomas Gallaudet. Clerc went back to Hartford with Gallaudet, arriving August 22, 1816. He met Gallaudet’s neighbor, Alice Cogswell and they decided to open a school for the deaf. On April 15, 1817 the school opened with seven students, including Alice. It was originally called the Connecticut Asylum at Hartford for the Instruction of Deaf and Dumb Persons but is now the American School for the Deaf. Clerc served as the head teacher. He died July 18, 1869 and is buried at Spring Grove Cemetery. Elizabeth Boardman Clerc was from Pennington, VT and one of the first pupils at the school. She married Laurent Marie Clerc on 3 May 1819. They had six children. In the portrait at the Atheneum you can see her forming a sign. She is buried with Laurent at Spring Grove Cemetery.

On your way down Main Street from campus, at 175 Main Street, is the Hispanic Health Council, which provides health care, research, advocacy, and training to improve the health of Latinos and other diverse populations in Hartford. It was founded in 1978 and now is the largest Hispanic social service organization in the state of Connecticut.

Continue down Main Street past the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art.

 

Wadsworth Atheneum Stop

If you have time, stop in. Trinity ID or Hartford resident get in for free. The Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art is the oldest continuously-operating public art museum in the United States, opening its doors to the public in 1844. Notable portraits in the Wadsworth Atheneum for this tour pictured below: Horace Wells; Laurent Clerc; and Elizabeth Boardman Clerc.

Horace Wells was born January 21, 1815.  He was a dentist who is credited with pioneering the use of anesthesia in dentistry, specifically the use of nitrous oxide. After obtaining a degree, Wells set up a practice in Hartford, Connecticut, with an associate named William T. G. Morton at the corner of Main Street and Asylum Ave.  He practiced from 1841 to 1845,  On December 10, 1844 he went with his wife to  “A Grand Exhibition of the Effects Produced by Inhaling Nitrous Oxide, Exhilarating, or Laughing Gas.”  The demonstration by Gardner Quincy Colton took place at Union Hall, Hartford. During the demonstration, a local apothecary shop clerk Samuel A. Cooley was given nitrous oxide and then showed no pain after being struck or falling down. The following day, Wells conducted a trial on himself by inhaling nitrous oxide and having John Riggs extract a tooth.   He did not feel any pain so he continued to use nitrous oxide on at least 12 other patients in his office.In 1844 he went to Boston to demonstrate the powers of nitric oxide in dentistry.  For reasons unknown (some say the gas was improperly administered, others say it was because the patient was an alcoholic) the patient cried out in pain.  As a result Wells was not taken seriously and he did not ever get over this embarrassment.  He sold his home and dissolved his practice.  He left his wife and young son in Hartford and moved to New York City where he begin experimenting on himself with ether and chloroform, leading to addiction.  Under the influence he went into the street and threw sulfuric acid on two women outside.  He was sent to the Tombs Prison.  Realizing what he had done he requested a shaving kit and killed himself with the razor after inhaling chloroform.  He died on January 24, 1848 in his prison cell.  He is buried at Cedar Hill Cemetery where there is a large monument.  Twelve days before his death, unknown to him, the Parisian Medical Society voted to honor him as the first person to discover the use of ether to eliminate pain during surgery.

THE MAN WHO DEFIED PAIN

 

A history of the discovery of the application of nitrous oxide gas, ether, and other vapors, to surgical operations

 

Laurent Clerc was born in 1785 in France.  He was deaf and enrolled in the first public school for the deaf in the world, which was in France.  As an adult he was demonstrating sign language in London and his demonstration was seen by Thomas Gallaudet.  Clerc went back to Hartford with Gallaudet, arriving August 22, 1816.  He met Gallaudet’s neighbor, Alice Cogswell and they decided to open a school for the deaf.  On April 15, 1817 the school opened with seven students, including Alice.  It was originally called the Connecticut Asylum at Hartford for the Instruction of Deaf and Dumb Persons but is now the American School for the Deaf. Clerc served as the head teacher.  He died July 18, 1869 and is buried at Spring Grove Cemetery.  Elizabeth Boardman Clerc was from Pennington, VT and one of the first pupils at the school.  She married Laurent Marie Clerc on 3 May 1819. They had six children.  In the portrait at the Atheneum you can see her forming a sign. She is buried with Laurent at Spring Grove Cemetery.

ASL Tour: Charles Willson Peale

Louis Laurent Marie Clerc

You can learn much more about deaf history in Hartford here.

At the Atheneum you have two options.

1. Turn right on Gold Street. 1 Gold Street is the location of the first American School for the Deaf (the second is at 54 Prospect Street).  Continue until you reach 38 Prospect St. where Alice Cogswell grew up.  Nearby at 16 Buckingham is the Gallaudet House.

Alice Cogswell was born August 31, 1805, in Hartford Connecticut. At the age of two she became ill and lost her hearing as a result. The illness is unknown but is believed to have been meningitis.  Her family had very little communication with her at this point, but her neighbor Thomas Gallaudet noticed her intelligence when she was nine years old. Gallaudet noticed that Alice had the ability to spell words out in the dirt when they were playing one day. Alice’s father, Mason F. Cogswell, was thrilled by Gallaudet’s discovery. Mason raised money and used his connections to send Gallaudet to Europe to research the best strategies for deaf education. Gallaudet returned to Connecticut with Laurent Clerc, a deaf teacher. Gallaudet opened the American School for the Deaf in 1817, originally named the American Asylum for the Education and Instruction of Deaf and Dumb Persons, where Alice was one of first students to attend. Following her graduation in 1824, Alice Cogswell travelled widely to raise awareness about the reality of deafness and the need for a system of education for deaf people.  She died at age 25 in 1830, just 13 days after the death of her father.

September 8th, 1819

There is beginning to build a new Asylum which is established on Lord’s hill. I do hope that this will be very commodious and many deaf and dumb will be able to be admitted, and the garden is established and is not new, but in full of different fruits and flowers and indeed large baoundary, and I think the view of that place will be admirable, and I hope all the deaf and dumb will have comfortable estate and be good and happy and improving.  The Providence has good blessing for us for a new Asylum.

Tribute to Gallaudet

https://www.disabilitymuseum.org/dhm/lib/detail.html?id=698

If you head back to Main Street and head north, at 805 Main Street you will find the plaque across the street from the Old Statehouse that marks the location of Horace Wells’ dental office.  The plaque was created by Enoch Woods.  It has a profile of Wells with the inscription, “To the memory of Horace Wells Dentist who upon this spot DECEMBER 11 1844 submitted to a surgical operation DISCOVERED demonstrated and proclaimed the blessings of ANESTHESIA.”

At 675 Main Street you can find a Wells stained glass window in Center Church, where Horace and his wife were members.  Inscriptions on the window read “Neither shall there be any more pain for the former things are passed away” and “In memoriam Horace Wells the Discoverer of Anesthesia and his wife Elizabeth Wales Wells.”

 

Then turn right on Steel and visit the Connecticut Science Center. Check out their Sight and Sound exhibit and test the helmets in their Sports Lab.

 

 

 

 

 

.Turn left on Gold Street. Head into Bushnell Park.  In Bushnell Park find the statue of Horace Wells

Ride the unique carousel. Bushnell Park was designed in 1861 by Jacob Weidenmann, a Swiss-born landscape architect and botanist. He was recommended by Olmstead who was too busy working on Central Park at the time to do it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Exit the Park and turn left on Asylum Ave. You should be able to find 373 Asylum where Barbara McClintock lived. Barbara McClintock was born in Hartford, Connecticut in 1902. Her father, Thomas, was a physician. Her mother Sara was known as an independent thinker. Her family did not have enough money to support her, so her parents sent Barbara to live with her aunt and uncle from the ages of three to six. Barbara was described as unusual for a girl in her time. She liked to read, play baseball, climb trees, and do science. She recalled that other children teased her, but she thought it was worth it. She once stated, “I would take the consequences for the sake of an activity I knew would give me great pleasure.” After graduating high school at age sixteen, she worked in an office to save money for college. Then she learned that Cornell University College of Agriculture was free, so she went there. In college, she discovered her love of genetics. Early in her career, she produced the first genetic map of the maize plant. After years of research, she discovered that some genes actually jump. At the time it was thought that genes stayed in a special order, like beads on a string, and so her results were doubted and questioned. But in 1983 Dr. McClintock won a Nobel Prize for her discovery of transposons or “mobile genetic elements.”

“If you know you are on the right track, if you have this inner knowledge, then nobody can turn you off… no matter what they say.”–Barbara McClintock

 

 

 

https://www.nobelprize.org/womenwhochangedscience/stories/barbara-mcclintock

https://www.cwhf.org/inductees/barbara-mcclintock

 

Continue on Asylum Ave to Gallaudet Square. Admire the statue of Alice Cogswell.

William Beecher Scoville was a descendent of Harriet Beecher Stowe.  He was born in Philadelphia in 1905 to Samuel and Catherine (Trumbull) Scoville. His mother was a descendant of Thomas Gallaudet.  He attended Loomis School, received his undergraduate degree at Yale University and his medical degree at the University of Pennsylvania.  He established the first neurosurgery department at Hartford Hospital in 1939. His first wife was Emily Learned Scoville and they had three children that they raised on North Steele Road, Barrett, Alison, and Peter. In 1941 he developed the first neurosurgery residency program in Connecticut.  His students referred to him as “Wild Bill.”  ‘Bill drove fast, lived hard and operated where angels feared to tread,” said Dr. David Crombie, former chief of surgery at Hartford Hospital who met Scoville in the early 1960s as an intern at the hospital and became friends with his son.  See this post about Henry Molaison for a description of the surgery that Dr. Scoville performed.  Scoville’s wife had schizophrenia and this may have played a role in his desire to find surgical options for treating mental illnesses.  In the book written by his grandson, Luke Dittrick, Dittrick speculates that Dr. Scoville may have actually performed surgery on his wife, Emily Learned Scoville.  In addition to the surgery on Mr. Molaison, Dr. Scoville is known for a coiled aneurysm clip that he invented.  His second marriage was to Helene Deniau Scoville, with whom he had two children Sophie and William. Dr. Scoville’s brother was Rev. Gordon Scoville, the founding pastor of Westminster Presbyterian Church in West Hartford. Dr. Scoville had a life-long interest in cars and was known for driving his red Jaguar or motorcycle on Steele Road and tinkering with cars in his spare time.  He was an early proponent for motorcycle helmets but never wore one himself.  Scoville was killed in 1984, at the age of 78, when he backed up his car on the highway to get to an exit he had missed.