Austin Flint

Flint, Austin

(1812–86) physician; born in Petersham, Mass. After taking his M.D. at Harvard (1833), he practiced and taught in Boston and Buffalo, N.Y., where in 1847 he founded Buffalo Medical College. He thereafter concentrated on hospital medicine and teaching at various medical schools, including the University of Louisville and New Orleans Medical College. In 1861 he helped found Bellevue Medical College in New York City, and taught there and at Long Island College Hospital for many years. An authority on pulmonary and respiratory diseases, he popularized the use of the binaural stethoscope. He wrote numerous textbooks, of which Treatise on the Principles and Practice of Medicine (1866; many revised editions) was the best known.

The Cambridge Dictionary of American Biography, by John S. Bowman. Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995. Reproduced with permission.