MORGAN, JOHN

born June 10, 1735, Philadelphia died Oct. 15, 1789, Philadelphia pioneer of American medical education, surgeon general of the Continental armies during the U.S. War of Independence, and founder of the United States' first medical school. Morgan studied at the University of Edinburgh (M.D., 1763), at Paris, and in Italy. Returning to the colonies in 1765, he founded their first medical school at the College of Philadelphia (now the University of Pennsylvania) and there was appointed North America's first professor of medicine. His policies of requiring a liberal education for medical students and the separation of medicine, surgery, and pharmacology into distinct disciplines, outlined in his Discourse upon the Institution of Medical Schools in America (1765), met with widespread opposition from colonial physicians and failed to gain acceptance. Upon the start of the American Revolution, Morgan became an ardent patriot and was appointed Director-General to the Military Hospitals and Physician-in-Chief to the American Army by the Continental Congress in 1775. Morgan tried to bring the nearly autonomous regimental surgeons under general army control, but Congress would not reorganize the system. A faction headed by William Shippen sought to oust him from office, and in 1777 Morgan was held responsible for the high mortality rate in the army and was dismissed from his post by Congress. Two years later Morgan was absolved of all wrongdoing both by George Washington and by the Congress, but he never recovered from his disgrace and died an impoverished recluse 10 years later. One of the first American physicians to adopt the English physician Edward Jenner's method of inoculation against smallpox, Morgan also wrote A Recommendation of Inoculation (1776).