2 Quotes & Sayings By Oliver Evans
Oliver Evans was born in West Chester, Pennsylvania on August 18th, 1784. As the son of a blacksmith, he grew up working with his hands and developed an early interest in mechanical devices. He apprenticed as a machinist and pipe maker at the age of seventeen and began to read widely about engineering and science. He attended lectures at West Chester Academy and then went on to study medicine at the University of Pennsylvania
His studies were derailed by an unfortunate accident that left him partially paralyzed on one side of his body. Despite his handicap, Evans was able to complete his medical studies and received his M.D. degree in 1809. After graduating, Evans returned to his native West Chester to practice medicine.
His first surgical case was that of an injured slave who had been mauled by a tiger. This case set him on the course of medical experimentation that would span most of his life. During the next twenty-five years, he performed over three hundred operations on slaves, indentured servants, prisoners, and other patients for which there was no available treatment or cure.
While some of these operations were performed for purely cosmetic purposes, Evans also performed successful operations that saved numerous lives from infection or injury. In addition to operating instruments from his home lab, Evans invented six major instrument innovations: In 1820 he moved to Philadelphia where he practiced medicine as a general practitioner and opened a successful office for the treatment of eye diseases as well as other disorders throughout the country. In 1827 he married Lucretia Morris who was a well-known Quaker philanthropist and abolitionist who helped found several schools for freed slaves in Philadelphia and helped establish a girls' school for poor girls in her hometown of New Jersey. She died the following year after giving birth to their only child, a son named William Morris after whom Ollie's best known invention was named: The Morris Worm Drill (Morris worm is short for "Morris worm gear"). In 1830 he married Mary Scullin who bore him two more children before dying five years later from tuberculosis at the age of thirty-six.
In 1833 he remarried again after this second wife died shortly thereafter from pneumonia shortly before she turned thirty-eight years old. In 1835 he married his third wife Eliza Edmondson who bore him two more children before her death in 1843 from tuberculosis at the age of thirty-seven years old after giving birth to their