He was sent to Scotland and graduated in 1786 from the University of Edinburgh Medical School with an M.D., his education being paid for by a wealthy uncle.[3] Returning to the United States after medical school, Mitchill also completed law school.[4] As a lawyer, he oversaw the purchase of lands in western New York from the Iroquois Indians in 1788.[2]
In addition to his Columbia lectures on botany, zoology, and mineralogy, Mitchill collected, identified, and classified many plants and animals, particularly aquatic organisms. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1797.[6] From 1807 to 1826, he taught at the College of Physicians and Surgeons of New York and then helped organize the short-lived Rutgers Medical College of New Jersey, which he served as vice president until 1830. While at Columbia, Mitchill developed a fallacious theory of disease; however, it resulted in his promotion of personal hygiene and improved sanitation.[7]
Mitchill was elected a member of the American Antiquarian Society in 1814.[10] On January 29, 1817, Mitchill convened the first meeting of the New York Academy of Sciences, originally called the Lyceum of Natural History, of which he was later elected president.[11]
Mitchill strongly endorsed the building of the Erie Canal, sponsored by his friend and political ally DeWitt Clinton; they were both members of the short-lived New-York Institution.[12] Mitchill suggested renaming the United States of America Fredonia, combining the English "freedom" with a Latinate ending. Although the suggestion was not seriously considered, some towns adopted the name, including Fredonia, New York.[13] Some freebooters established a short-lived republic under that name in Texas in the late 1820s.
Personality
Mitchill was a man of "irrepressible energies... polyglot enthusiasms... [and] distinguished eccentricities" who was not "a man afraid to speak out loud about the loves of plants and animals; indeed, he was not a man afraid to speak out loud on most any topic. In the early nineteenth century, Mitchill was New York's "most publicly universal gentleman... a man known variously as the 'living encyclopedia,' as a 'stalking library,' and (to his admired Jefferson) as the 'Congressional Dictionary.'"[14] "Once described as a 'chaos of knowledge,' Mitchill was generally more admired for his encyclopedic breadth of understanding than for much originality of thought." As a personality, he was affable but also egotistical and pedantic. Mitchill enjoyed popularizing scientific knowledge and promoting practical applications of scientific inquiry.[7]
Published works
Mitchill, S. L. 1818. Description of three species of fish. Journal of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia 1, 407–412. (BHL link)
^D. Graham Burnett, Trying Leviathan: The Nineteenth-Century New York Court Case That Put the Whale on Trial and Challenged the Order of Nature (Princeton University Press, 2007), p. 45.
^Baatz, Simon (1990). "Knowledge, Culture and Science in the Metropolis: The New York Academy of Sciences, 1817–1970". Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences. 584: 1–256. doi:10.1111/nyas.1990.584.issue-1. PMID2200324.
^George R. Stewart, Names on the Land (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967) 173.
^Burnett, 44. In 1828, Martin Harris, an associate of Joseph Smith, the founder of the Latter Day Saint movement, visited Mitchill to ask him to authenticate the "Reformed Egyptian" characters that Smith said were taken from golden plates to which he said he had been directed by an angel. Mitchill would have been unsympathetic to the view that Indians were related to the Jews or the Egyptians because he was one of the few scholars of his day who believed that Native Americans were descended from Asians. Mitchill left no record of Harris's visit.Richard E. Bennett (Winter 2010), "'Read This I Pray Thee': Martin Harris and the Three Wise Men of the East", Journal of Mormon History, vol. 36, pp. 178–216; Richard Bushman (2005), Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, p. 64; Fawn Brodie (1971), No Man Knows My History, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, p. 51.