William Melville Hart scrapbook on George E. Holtzapple

Item

Identifier: 10c 141

Scope and Contents

Commemorative scrapbook presented to George Holatzapple on May 22, 1936, at his seventy-fourth birthday party. Contains correspondence, a radio broadcast script, and newspclippings, to commemorate the eariliset administration of oxygen in the treatment of pneumonia, which was performed by Holtzapple in 1885.

Dates

1935 - 1936

Creator

Hart, William Melville (Compiler, Person)

Biographical / Historical

William Melville Hart lived in York County, Pennsylvania. No further information could be found on Hart.

George E. Holtzapple was born on May 22, 1862, in York County, Pennsylvania, to Israel Erasmus and Christiana (Lecrone) Holtzapple. He attended York Academy and later, the York Collegiate Institute. He received his M.D. in 1884 from Bellevue Hospital Medical College (New York, N.Y.), and purchased his private practice from a retiring physician in Loganville, York County.

In the winter of 1885, an influenza epidemic broke out in Loganville. Holtzapple administered oxygen to his pneumonia patient. His use of oxygen (in 1885) as a therapeutic agent in the treatment of pneumonia is believed to be the first.

Holtzapple presented a paper on the use of oxygen as a therapeutic agent to the York Medical Society and published in the New York Medical Journal on the same topic. In 1935, he was presented with a Congressional Medal of Honor.

Holtzapple was a member of the American Medical Association and the American School of Physicians. He served as the director for the York County Chapter of the Red Cross and was Chairman of its First Aid Medical Courses.

Holtzapple died at the age of 83 in 1945.