Author: Henry Hartshorne

Henry Hartshorne was a Philadelphia physician, medical teacher, editor, and poet whose publications crossed professional and literary boundaries. A Monograph On Glycerin and Its Uses, issued by J. B. Lippincott in 1865, examined the chemical substance as a solvent and considered its medical and practical applications. Cholera, published in 1866 and expanded as Cholera: Facts and Conclusions as to Its Nature, Prevention, and Treatment, developed from his clinical and public-health engagement, including service during the 1854 outbreak in Columbia, Pennsylvania. Summer Songs appeared in Philadelphia in 1865 as a collection of verse, revealing a markedly different side of the same author. Hartshorne earned his medical degree at the University of Pennsylvania, taught hygiene and medicine in several Philadelphia institutions, and later taught organic science and philosophy at Haverford College. Together, these three works show the range of a nineteenth-century physician who wrote for specialists, general readers, and literary audiences rather than remaining inside a single discipline.