He then was a professor at the medical school at Dartmouth College and also at Middlebury College, as well as serving as a medical lecturer at other institutions. Mussey is credited as the first surgeon to tie both carotid arteries in 1829.[5][6] He lectured on anatomy and surgery at Bowdoin College (1831–1835) and Fairfield Academy (1836–1838).[2] He was professor of surgery at the Medical College of Ohio (1838–1852) and was chair of surgery at Miami Medical College in Cincinnati (1852–1857).[2]
Mussey and his first wife Mary Sewall did not have any children. After her death he married Herry Osgood, and they had nine children.[2] Besides Reuben Jr., there was also William H. Mussey and Francis B. Mussey who both followed their father into the medical profession. Charles F. Mussey became a Presbyterian minister. Mussey's daughter Maria married Lyman Mason, and his daughter Catharine married Shattuck Hartwell.
Vegetarianism
Mussey was a vegetarian who abstained from alcohol and tobacco.[2][10] In 1832, Mussey "gave up the eating of flesh as an experiment", he did not eat the flesh of land animals for the rest of his life but occasionally consumed fish in 1850.[11] He was a frequent contributor to William Alcott's vegetarian journal Library of Health.[12] His 1862 book Health: Its Friends and Foes included chapters on vegetarianism and on the dangers of tobacco.[13] It was positively reviewed in the Cincinnati Lancet and Observer
and The New England Journal of Medicine.[14][15]