– by Robert Hicks, Director of the Mütter Museum & the Historical Medical Library
William Maul Measey Chair for the History of Medicine
By the mid-nineteenth century, Joseph Mellick Leidy (1823-91) was the poster boy of Victorian natural history. A photographic portrait of him in middle age shows a handsome, serious, debonair man, sitting cross-legged, his right elbow casually resting on a table, inches away from a sophisticated brass microscope, its eyepiece tilted towards Leidy. Paleontological specimens line a fireplace mantle behind him. Several disciplines today tag Leidy as their patriarch. He is the Father of American Vertebrate Paleontology. He is the Founder of American Parasitology. His biographer Leonard Warren titled his work The Last Man Who Knew Everything.[1]