Sacramento
County
Biographies
WALLACE ALVIN BRIGGS,
M.D.
(1848-1927)
Dr. Wallace A. Briggs is granted the distinct honor of being Sacramento's most outstanding general practitioner of medicine. He had a type of mind that was both adventitious and innate: a power to perceive and utilize from without, with keen observance, and an inherent intellect forever searching and weighing, refusing the impracticable. 'Dr. Briggs was before all things a student with an open and inquiring mind and, in spite of the detail of a great general practice, or better, because of it when illuminated by his study, reasoning and experience, he became eminent in every branch of medicine that he touched. He did not specialize in internal medicine, yet for years he was our most valued practitioner and consultant therein. He did not specialize in obstetrics, yet he attended and recorded over 3500 confinements before he gave up this branch of medicine. He did not specialize in gynecology, but his reputation therein was not merely local but extended throughout, and beyond the borders of, this State. He did not specialize in electro-therapeutics but at a time when no one else in the community was doing anything with it he had what was for the time an elaborate equipment and rational understanding of the procedures. He was no trained laboratory man, yet at a time, twenty years ago, when vaccine therapy was in its infancy, he was making autogenous vaccines for his patients in his own laboratory, bringing to town to run it a trained laboratory physician. Furthermore, during the many years when he practiced it, he was a competent and conservative general surgeon. Whatever he did he did well.'¹ His pioneer work in gynecology attracted outside attention. He 'was once asked to assume the professorship of a great medical college on this subject, but he declined, stating at the time that his work was outlined for him in Sacramento.'²
After graduating in medicine at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, March, 1871, he took post-graduate work in medical schools in New York, Berlin and Paris. Dr. Briggs then returned to his native Ohio to practice. When subsequently he came to California he opened an office at Winters. “Later he moved to Folsom, where he remained for a short time, and then came to Sacramento.'³ As a guest he first attended the Sacramento Society for Medical Improvement, September 11, 1877, and was proposed for membership November, 1877. It was the beginning of a medical association in and around which he accomplished much, both officially and professionally. In medicine, he became 'both a pioneer and a connoisseur, always ready to supply what appeared to be lacking in material and technique and prompt to test all remedies that promised relief of suffering, but safely conservative in final approval and adoption of any measure.'4 For fifty years he exercised a stable, persevering influence within the medical profession. 'Strong in his convictions, positive in his statements, yet always tolerant and open to reason. Courageous without egotism, genial and confidential without pretense or sophistry. Modest to the point of obscuring his own personality in his desire and effort to support and strengthen a brother physician.'5
Dr. Briggs was a systematic individual; a hard thinking, hard working 'doer'. He was able to carry practice burdens 'which would have crushed many a physician into a mere busy mediocrity.'6 and able to grant himself periods for research, for study of medical and general literature, and writing innumerable essays on medical and other topics. His philosophy of thought might be better demonstrated through an expression made before the California Northern District Medical Society in 1894: “A people, and, on a grander scale, all mankind, constitute a sociological unit, just as the individual man himself constitutes a physiological unit. In national life the social functions are developed and coordinated, just as the vital functions are developed and coordinated in the individual life; and just as vital functions subserve the common good of that organized aggregate of functions which we call man, so, in his various callings, should man himself subserve the common good of that organized aggregate of individual men which we call state.”
'Many of us can remember,' stated his obituarians, 'in the preautomobile days, the little two horse, closed coupe, with old John on the box in which Dr. Briggs made his professional rounds, with an enormous pocket in either door stuffed with journals and other medical literature between which sat Dr. Briggs reading, ever reading, taking from one door pocket and when finished stuffing them in the other. He never got away even in old age from thus keeping up with the latest thought in medicine and those of us who were privileged in his later years to have him as a consultant were amazed by the familiarity he showed with the most recent medical literature. Mentally he never grew old and although increasing years gradually required the abandoning of many lines of practice his interests always were those of a general practitioner and he will be remembered, both by the profession and by the public which he served so long and so faithfully, as a fine, almost perfect flower of the general practice of medicine.'
The Doctor had an inventive turn of mind. Obstetrical forceps, a 'suture stay' for the repair of a lacerated perineum, a copper sterilizer for obstetrical use, an S-shaped wire retractor, a device for automatic regulation of the stream of water in a Leiter coil, a bandage for the non-surgical treatment of floating kidney (the bandage was reinforced in front by a small plate, which made possible more direct pressure upon the flanks), and a differential phonendoscope and a tuning fork for delineating areas in percussion, were a few he displayed before the Society for observation and discussion.
'His supreme quality was intelligence. He was an intellect personified and the range of his interests covered not only all phases of his profession but many matters of general interest. He did his share in civic matters, even finding time to serve as one of the Board of Freeholders which in 1911 prepared Sacramento's Commission form Charter. He kept himself abreast of the times in art and literature, retaining to extreme old age in matters of general culture, as well as in medicine, his activity and receptivity of mind. At sixty-five years of age, although already reading and speaking French and German, he learned to read Italian.'7 For twenty years, during odd moments he was able to crowd into a busy life, he made study and research 'to bring together representative selections of the work of every important English poet from the beginnings of poetry in our language down to the present time.'8 The anthology, “Great Poems of the English Language,” was published in 1927. It was the final accomplishment in his resourceful life, an ambition long anticipated, an ultimate beckoning from the scholarly gentleman, and printed just as Night had begun to prepare a shaded place from life's sunshine.
On August 27, 1927, Dr. Thos. W. Huntington wrote Dr. Briggs this letter:
“My Fine Friend and
Esteemed Colleague:
“Ships sail east---
Ships sail west
With the self-same winds that blow,
It's not the gales
But the set of the sails
That determines the way they go.”
“With discriminating exactness and infinite patience you have consistently, through a long lifetime, trimmed your sails to the currents of human thought, to the end that you have arrived. Perhaps there is no better confirmation of this utterance than is found in the choice of friendships you have won, enduring friendships; a harvest you have gleaned from “having held all things beautiful, the best.”
“And now with full appreciation of the splendid work of your later years, let me thank you many times for a signed copy of your “Immortelles.” To me the volume possesses a value far above what is termed intrinsic. It will be given a place among my treasures.”
Wallace Alvin Briggs was born June 22, 1848, at Sharon, Ohio, the son of Abiel and Harriet C. (Dinsmore) Briggs. When twenty-three years of age he married Ella N. Pardee. The couple had two children: Evelyn Briggs, who preceded her parents in death, and Dr. William D. Briggs, professor of English literature at Stanford University.
Dr. W. A. Briggs held many responsible positions, of both medical and public capacity. Fraternally he was a member of the Masonic order and the Sacramento Lodge #6 of Elks.
The dean of Sacramento's medical practitioners passed away at his residence, 2015 Twenty-first street, on Saturday, November 26, 1927 and was interred in the East Lawn Cemetery on November 28th.
“A kind, true heart, a spirit high,
That could not fear and would not bow
Were written in his manly eye
And on his manly brow.
He kept his honesty and truth,
His independent tongue and pen,
And moved in manhood as in youth
Pride of his fellow men.”
_______
1 Obituary, by Committee of the Sacramento Society for Medical Improvement,
Minutes of the Society.
2 The Sacramento Bee, November 28, 1927, p. 1, col. 4.
3 The Sacramento Bee, November 28, 1927, p. 1, col. 4.
4 California and Western Medicine, V. XXVIII, No. 2, February 1928, p. 245.
5 Yolo-Colusa Medical Society.
6 Obituary, Sacramento Society for Medical Improvement, Minutes of.
7 Obituary, Sacramento Society for Medical Improvement, Minutes of Society.
8 Dr. W. A. Briggs.
Transcribed 4-12-17 Marilyn R. Pankey.
Source: “Memories,
Men and Medicine A History of Medicine In Sacramento, California by J. Roy
Jones, M.D., Pages 406-430. Publ. Sacramento Society for
Medical Improvement, 1950.
Golden Nugget
Library's Sacramento County