Brig. General George Miller Sternberg

Born at Hartwick Seminary, Otsego County, New York, on June 8, 1838, he received a medical degree from the Maryland College of Physicians in 1860.

He was appointed Assistant Surgeon, United States Army, on May 28, 1861; Captain, May 28, 1866; Major (Surgeon), December 1, 1873; Lieutenant Colonel (Surgeon), January 12, 1891, Brigadier General, Surgeon General, May 30, 1893; and retired from the Army on June 8, 1902.

During the Civil War, he began his service with the Army of the Potomac, later transferring to the Department of the Gulf. At the end of the war, he was in command of the US General Hospital, Cleveland, Ohio. He served throughout the Cholera and Yellow Fever epidemics in the United States and was a member of the Yellow Fever Commission, and the National Board of Health. He was widely credited with the development of ambulance services for wounded soldiers in the Civil War and many of his battlefield treatment methods remain in place today.

He died on November 3, 1915 and was buried in Section 2 of Arlington National Cemetery. His wife, Martha L. Pattison Sternberg, is buried with him.

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GEORGE MILLER STERNBERG (June 8, 1838 - Nov. 3, 1915), Surgeon General, May 30, 1893 - June 8, 1902, was born at Hartwick Seminary, Otsego County, N. Y., where he spent most of his childhood. His father, Levi Sternberg, a Lutheran clergyman who later became principal of Hartwick Seminary, was descended from a German family from the Palatinate, which had settled in the Schoharie valley in the early years of the eighteenth century. His mother, Margaret Levering (Miller) Sternberg, was the daughter of George B. Miller, also a Lutheran clergyman and professor of theology at the seminary, a Lutheran school. George was the eldest of a large family and it was necessary for him to lift from his father's shoulders as much as he could of the burden of its support. His studies at the seminary were interrupted by a year of employment in a bookstore in Cooperstown and by three years of teaching in neighboring rural schools. During his last year at Hartwick he was an instructor in mathematics, chemistry, and natural philosophy, and at the same time was pursuing the study of medicine with Dr. Horace Lathrop of Cooperstown. For his medical studies he went first to Buffalo, New York, and later to the College of Physicians and Surgeons of New York where he received the degree of M. D. in the spring of 1860. Following graduation he settled in Elizabeth, New Jersey, for practice and remained there until the outbreak of the Civil War.

He was appointed an assistant surgeon in the United States Army on May 28, 1861, and on July 21 of that year he was captured at the Battle of Bull Run, while serving with General George Sykes' division. He was able to escape and soon joined his command in the defense of Washington. Later he participated in the Peninsular campaign and saw service in the battles of Gaines' Mill and Malvern Hill. During this campaign he contracted typhoid fever while at Harrison's Landing and was sent north on a transport.

During the remainder of the war he performed hospital duty, mainly at Portsmouth Grove in Rhode Island, and at Cleveland, Ohio. On March 13, 1865, he was given the brevets of captain and major for faithful and meritorious service during the war. The years following the war were full of the moves which make up the life of a junior medical officer.

Sternberg was married on October 19, 1865, to Louisa Russell, daughter of Robert Russell of Cooperstown, New York, and took his bride to Jefferson Barracks, Missouri, from whence he was soon transferred to Fort Harker, Kansas. Mrs. Sternberg did not accompany him to the latter post, but joined him in 1867 just prior to all outbreak of cholera. She was one of the first civilians to develop the disease which caused her death within a few hours on July 15.

Sternberg, a captain since May 28, 1866, was sent to Fort Riley, Kansas, in December 1867, and with troops from this post took part, during 1868-69, in several expeditions against hostile Cheyenne Indians along the upper Arkansas river in Indian Territory and western Kansas. He served at Fort Riley until July 1870, when be was ordered to Governors Island, New York. In the meantime, he was married September 1, 1869, at Indianapolis, Indiana, to Martha L. Pattison, daughter of Thomas T. N. Pattison of that city. Two years at Governors Island and three years, 1872-1875, at Fort Barrancas, Florida, gave him frequent contacts with yellow fever and at the latter post he contracted the disease himself. He had noted the efficiency of moving inhabitants out of an infested environment and successfully applied the methods to the Barrancas garrison.

About this time he published two articles in the New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal ("An Inquiry into the Modus Operandi of the Yellow Fever Poison," July 1875, and "A Study of the Natural History of Yellow Fever," March 1877) which

gave him a definite status as an authority on yellow fever.

While convalescing from the disease in 1877 be was ordered to Fort Walla Walla, Washington, where later in the same year be participated in a campaign against the Nez Perce Indians. The spare hours of his early service had been well employed in study and experimentation which laid the foundation for his later work. He perfected an anemometer and in 1870 patented an automatic heat regulator which has had wide use.

On December 1, 1875, be was promoted to the grade of major and in April 1879 be was ordered to Washington, D. C., and detailed with the Havana Yellow Fever Commission, his medical associates being Dr. Stanfard Chaille of New Orleans and Dr. Juan Guiteras of Havana. In the distribution of the work Sternberg was given the problems relating to the nature and natural history of the cause of the disease which involved microscopical examination of blood and tissues of yellow fever patients. In these investigations he was one of the first to employ the newly discovered process of photomicography, and he developed high efficiency in its use. He spent three months in Havana closely associated with Dr. Carlos Finlay, the proponent of the theory of transmission of yellow fever by the mosquito.

After a year's work the Commission arrived at the conclusion that the solution of the cause of yellow fever must wait upon further progress in the new science of bacteriology. Soon after this Sternberg was sent to New Orleans to investigate the conflicting discoveries of the Plasmodium malariae of Alphonse Laveran, and the Bacillus malariae of Arnold Karl Klebs and Carrado Tomassi-Caudeli. His report, made in 1881, declared that the Bacillus malariae had no part in the causation of malaria. In this same year, simultaneously with Louis Pasteur, he announced the discovery of the pneumococcus, now recognized as the pathogenic agent in lobar pneumonia. He was the first in this country to demonstrate the plasmodium of

malaria (1885) and the bacilli of tuberculosis and typhoid fever (1886). The interest in bacteriology naturally led to an interest in disinfection and he was the American pioneer in the field. He began these experiments in 1878 with putrefactive bacteria and continued them in Washington and in the laboratories of Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, under the auspices of the American Public Health Association.

For his essay Disinfection and Individual Prophylaxis against Infectious Diseases 1886, he was awarded the Lomb prize. The essay was translated into several languages. During the Hamburg cholera epidemic of 1892 he was detailed for duty with the New York quarantine station as a consultant on disinfection as applied to ships, their personnel, and cargo. Though cases of the disease reached American shores, none developed within the country. On January 2, 1891, he was promoted to lieutenant colonel.

With the retirement of General Sutherland in May 1893, Sternberg, as did many others, submitted his claims for consideration for the vacancy. While not the senior officer of the corps by any means, he was in the first dozen and was without question the most eminent professional man in the service. He received the appointment of Surgeon General at the hands of President Cleveland on May 30, 1893, with the grade of brigadier general.

His nine years' tenure of that office was a time of professional progress and was featured by the occurrence of the Spanish-American War. He was responsible for the establishment of the Army Medical School in 1893, for the organization of a contract dental service and the army nurse corps, the creation of the tuberculosis hospital at Fort Bayard, New Mexico, and of a special surgical hospital at Washington Barracks. The equipment of the medical school included laboratories of chemistry and bacteriology, and a liberal-minded policy was adopted in the supply of laboratory supplies to the larger military hospitals. With the Spanish-American War and its epidemic of typhoid fever, the problem of hospitalization, though difficult, was met with fair success. In that year of war the Surgeon General caused the organization of the Typhoid Fever Board, made up of Majors Walter Reed, Victor C. Vaughan, and Edward 0. Shakespeare, which established the facts of contact infection

and fly carriage of the disease; and in 1900 he organized the Yellow Fever Commission, headed by Major Reed, which fixed the transmission of yellow fever upon a particular species of mosquito. On his recommendation the first tropical disease board was established inManila in January 1900 where it functioned for about two years.

General Sternberg was retired on account of age on June 8, 1902, and devoted the later years of his life to social welfare activities in Washington, particularly to the sanitary improvement of habitations and the care of the tuberculous. He died at his home in Washington, on November 3, 1915. On his monument in Arlington Cemetery is the inscription:

"Pioneer American Bacteriologist, distinguished by his studies of the causation and prevention of infectious diseases, by his discovery of the microorganism causing pneumonia, and scientific investigations of yellow fever, which paved the way for the experimental demonstration of the mode of transmission of this pestilence. Veteran of three wars, breveted for bravery in action in the Civil War and the Nez Perce Wars. Served as Surgeon General of United States Army for period of nine years including the Spanish War. Founder of the Army Medical School. Scientist, author and philanthropist. M. D., LL. D."

His name will survive as that of the American bacteriologist, contemporary of Pasteur and Koch, who first brought the fundamental principles and technique of the new science within the reach of the American physician. From 1875, when he published his first articles on yellow fever, he was a frequent contributor to periodical literature of medicine. In 1892 he published his Manual of Bacteriology, the first exhaustive treatise on the subject produced in the United States.

His professional standing received wide and abundant recognition. The honorary degree of LL.D. was conferred upon him by the University of Michigan in 1894 and by Brown University in 1897. He was made an honorary member of the Epidemiological Society of London, the Royal Academy of Rome, the Academy of Medicine of Rio Janeiro, the American Academy of Medicine, and the French Society of Hygiene. He was a member, and one time president of the American Medical Association, the American Public Health Association, the Association of Military Surgeons of the United States, the Washington Biological Society, and the Philosophical Society of the District of Columbia.

He was a modest and unassuming man, gentle in manner and in speech, whose whole career was devoted to duty and untiring industry. Faced in the Spanish-American War with great difficulties he bore without reply the burden of much criticism, either unfounded or the result of conditions not of his making. He was short in stature, with a moderate stoutness in his later years. His later portraits show him with a white moustache and a fringe of white hair together with the fine intelligent forehead and keen speculative eyes which marked all his earlier portraits.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Miller_Sternberg

Brigadier General George Miller Sternberg (June 8, 1838 – November 3, 1915) was a U.S. Army physician who is considered the first U.S. bacteriologist, having written Manual of Bacteriology (1892). After he survived typhoid and yellow fever, Sternberg documented the cause of malaria (1881), discovered the cause of lobar pneumonia (1881), and confirmed the roles of the bacilli of tuberculosis and typhoid fever (1886).

As the 18th U.S. Army Surgeon General, from 1893 to 1902, Sternberg led commissions to control typhoid and yellow fever, along with his subordinate Major Walter Reed. Sternberg also oversaw the establishment of the Army Medical School (1893; now the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research) and of the U.S. Army Nurse Corps (1901). The pioneering German bacteriologist Robert Koch honored Sternberg with the sobriquet, "Father of American Bacteriology".

Biography

Youth and education

Sternberg was born at Hartwick Seminary, Otsego County, New York, where he spent most of his childhood. His father, Levi Sternberg, a Lutheran clergyman who later became principal of Hartwick Seminary, was descended from a German family from the Palatinate, which had settled in the Schoharie Valley in the early years of the 18th century. His mother, Margaret Levering (Miller) Sternberg, was the daughter of George B. Miller, also a Lutheran clergyman and professor of theology at the seminary, which was a Lutheran school. He was the eldest child of a large family and he was given adult responsibilities from an early age. He interrupted his studies at the seminary with a year of work in a bookstore in Cooperstown and three years of teaching in nearby rural schools. During his last year at Hartwick he was an instructor in mathematics, chemistry, and natural philosophy. He was at the same time pursuing the study of medicine with Horace Lathrop of Cooperstown. For his formal medical training he went first to Buffalo, and later to the College of Physicians and Surgeons of New York (M.D. degree, 1860). After graduation he settled in Elizabeth, New Jersey to practice, remaining there until the outbreak of the Civil War.

Early career

Junior Army surgeon

On May 28, 1861, he was appointed an Assistant Surgeon in the U.S. Army, and on July 21 of the same year was captured at the First Battle of Bull Run, while serving with General George Sykes' division. He managed to escape and soon joined his command in the defense of Washington. He later participated in the Peninsular campaign and saw service in the battles of Gaines' Mill and Malvern Hill. During this campaign he contracted typhoid fever while at Harrison's Landing and was sent north on a transport. During the remainder of the war he performed hospital duty, mostly at Portsmouth Grove, Rhode Island, and at Cleveland, Ohio. On March 13, 1865, he was given the Brevets of captain and major for faithful and meritorious service.

The years following the war followed the pattern of frequent moves typical of junior medical officers of the day. He married Louisa Russell, daughter of Robert Russell of Cooperstown, on October 19, 1865 and took his bride to Jefferson Barracks, Missouri, from where he was soon transferred to Fort Harker, near Ellsworth in Kansas. Louisa did not accompany him to the latter post, but joined him in 1867 just prior to an outbreak of cholera. She was one of the first civilians to develop the disease which killed her within a few hours on July 15 and soon claimed a toll of about 75 people at the fort.

Paleontology

Sternberg was promoted to captain on May 28, 1866 and was soon sent to Fort Riley, Kansas (December 1867). With troops from this post he took part (1868–69) in several expeditions against hostile Cheyenne Indians along the upper Arkansas River in Indian Territory and in western Kansas. Besides his military duties, Sternberg was also interested in fossils and began collecting leaf imprints from the nearby Dakota Sandstone Formation. Some of his specimens went back East where they were studied by the famous paleobotanist, Leo Lesquereux.

Sternberg also collected vertebrate fossils, including shark teeth, fish remains and mosasaur bones, from the Smoky Hill Chalk and Pierre Shale formations in western Kansas, and sent the specimens back to Washington, D.C., where they were eventually curated in the United States National Museum (Smithsonian Institution). There they were studied and later described in publications by Joseph Leidy. The type specimen of the giant Late Cretaceous fish, Xiphactinus audax, was collected by Dr. Sternberg.[citation needed] His work was also credited by Edward D. Cope and Samuel W. Williston. Sternberg was also responsible for getting his younger brother, Charles H. Sternberg, started in paleontology. Charles would later credit his older brother for getting many other paleontologists of the day interested in the fossil resources of Kansas.

Sternberg served at Fort Riley until July 1870, when be was ordered to Governors Island, New York. In the meantime, he had remarried on September 1, 1869, at Indianapolis, Indiana, to Martha L. Pattison, a daughter of Thomas T. N. Pattison of that city.

Later career

Yellow fever

During two years at Governors Island and three (1872–75) at Fort Barrancas, Florida, Sternberg had frequent contacts with yellow fever patients, and at the latter post, he contracted the disease himself. He had earlier noted the efficiency of moving inhabitants out of an infested environment and successfully applied that method to the Barrancas garrison. At about this time, Sternberg published two articles in the New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal ("An Inquiry into the Modus Operandi of the Yellow Fever Poison," July 1875, and "A Study of the Natural History of Yellow Fever," March 1877) which gained him status as an authority on yellow fever. While convalescing from his bout with the disease in 1877 be was ordered to Fort Walla Walla, Washington, and later that year he participated in a campaign against the Nez Perce Indians. The spent his spare hours in study and experimentation which laid a foundation for his later work. In 1870 he perfected an anemometer and patented an automatic heat regulator which later saw wide use.

On December 1, 1875, Sternberg was promoted major, and in April 1879, he was ordered to Washington, D. C., and detailed with the 1880 Havana Yellow Fever Commission. His medical colleagues on the Commission were Doctors Stanfard Chaille of New Orleans and Juan Guiteras of Havana. Sternberg was assigned to work on the problems relating to the nature and natural history of the disease and especially to its etiology (origins). This involved the microscopical examination of blood and tissues in which he was one of the first to employ the newly discovered process of photomicrography. He developed high efficiency in its use. In the course of this work, he spent three months in Havana closely associated with Dr. Carlos Finlay, the main proponent of the theory of mosquito transmission of yellow fever.

Bacteriology milestones

In 1880, the Commission concluded that the solution of yellow fever causality must await further progress in the new science of bacteriology. Sternberg was soon sent to New Orleans to investigate the conflicting discoveries of Plasmodium malariae by Alphonse Laveran, and of Bacillus malariae by Edwin Klebs and Corrado Tommasi-Crudeli. His report (1881) declared that the Bacillus malariae had no part in the causation of malaria. The same year — simultaneously with Louis Pasteur — he announced the discovery of the pneumococcus, eventually recognized as the pathogenic agent of lobar pneumonia. He was the first in the United States to demonstrate the Plasmodium organism as cause of malaria (1885) and the to confirm the causitive roles of the bacilli of tuberculosis and typhoid fever (1886). He was the first scientist to produce photomicrographs of the tubercule bacillus. He was also the earliest American pioneer in the related field of disinfection in which he began with experiments (1878) with putrefactive bacteria. This work was continued in Washington and in the laboratories of Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, under the auspices of the American Public Health Association. For his essay "Disinfection and Individual Prophylaxis against Infectious Diseases" (1886), later translated into several languages, he was awarded the Lomb Prize. He oversaw creation the US Army enlisted hospital corps ("medics") in 1887.

During the Hamburg cholera epidemic of 1892 he was detailed for duty with the New York quarantine station as a consultant on disinfection as applied to ships, their personnel, and cargo. Although some cases of the disease reached United States shores, none developed within the country.

Surgeon General

Sternberg was promoted to lieutenant colonel on January 2, 1891. In 1892 he published his Manual of Bacteriology, the first exhaustive treatise on the subject produced in the United States. With the retirement of Surgeon General Sutherland (May 1893), Sternberg, along with many others, submitted his claims for consideration for the vacancy. Although hardly the seniormost officer in the Medical Corps, he was among the top dozen and was without question the most eminent professional scientist in the service. He received the appointment of Surgeon General by President Grover Cleveland on May 30, 1893, with promotion to the grade of brigadier general.

Sternberg's nine-year tenure (1893–1902) as Surgeon General coincided with immense professional progress in the field of bacteriology as well as the occurrence of the Spanish-American War. He was responsible for the 1893 establishment of the Army Medical School (precursor of today's Walter Reed Army Institute of Research), the organization of a contract dental service, the creation of the tuberculosis hospital at Fort Bayard, New Mexico, and of a special surgical hospital at Washington Barracks. The equipment of the medical school included laboratories of chemistry and bacteriology, and a liberal-minded policy was adopted in the supply of laboratory supplies to the larger military hospitals. With the Spanish-American War and its epidemic of typhoid fever, the problem of field hospitalization was confronted with fair success. (He was subjected to much criticism for conditions at these hospitals, but made little reply.) Sternberg created the Typhoid Fever Board (1898), consisting of Majors Walter Reed, Victor C. Vaughan, and Edward O. Shakespeare, which established the facts of contact infection and fly carriage of the disease. In 1900 he organized the Yellow Fever Commission, headed by Reed, which ultimately fixed the transmission of yellow fever upon a particular species of mosquito. (These became celebrated as the “Walter Reed Boards”). On his recommendation the first tropical disease board was also established in Manila (January 1900) where it continued for about the next two years. In 1901, Sternberg oversaw the establishment of the U.S. Army Nurse Corps.

Sternberg was retired on account of age on June 8, 1902, and devoted the later years of his life to social welfare activities in Washington, particularly to the sanitary improvement of dwellings and to the care of tuberculous patients. Sternberg died at his home in Washington, on November 3, 1915.

Memberships and awards

Sternberg was a member of the Military Order of the Loyal Legion of the United States, the Society of the Army of the Potomac, the Sons of the American Revolution and the Association of Military Surgeons of the United States.

He was awarded the Civil War Campaign Medal and the Indian Campaign Medal. He was posthumously eligible for the Spanish War Service Medal.

Legacy

On Sternberg’s monument in Arlington National Cemetery is the inscription:

Pioneer American Bacteriologist, distinguished by his studies of the causation and prevention of infectious diseases, by his discovery of the microorganism causing pneumonia, and scientific investigations of yellow fever, which paved the way for the experimental demonstration of the mode of transmission of this pestilence. Veteran of three wars, breveted for bravery in action in the Civil War and the Nez Perce Wars. Served as Surgeon General of United States Army for period of nine years including the Spanish War. Founder of the Army Medical School. Scientist, author and philanthropist. M. D., LL. D. Along with Pasteur and Koch, Sternberg is credited with first bringing the fundamental principles and techniques of the new science of bacteriology within the reach of the average physician.

A collection of his papers is held at the National Library of Medicine in Bethesda, Maryland.

Awards and accolades

Honorary degree of LL.D., University of Michigan (1894)

Honorary degree of LL.D., Brown University (1897).

Honorary member, Epidemiological Society of London, the Royal Academy of Rome, the Academy of Medicine of Rio Janeiro, the American Academy of Medicine, and the French Society of Hygiene.

Member (and one time president) of the American Medical Association, the American Public Health Association, the Association of Military Surgeons of the United States, the Washington Biological Society, and the Philosophical Society of the District of Columbia.

Miscellany

Frank Heynick, author of a gigantic tome, Jews and Medicine: An Epic Saga (2003), was dismayed to come across the name of George Sternberg as he was finalizing his manuscript. He had not mentioned Sternberg in his book and the idea of researching yet another life, adding more pages to the 600 page book, and trimming back other parts was disheartening. Further research on Sternberg’s background ensued. As it turned out Sternberg was not, in fact, Jewish — “Thank heavens!” said the ecstatic Heynick.