Simon Baruch

Simon Baruch (July 29, 1840 - June 3, 1921) was a physician and a pioneer of hydrotherapy in the United States.

Biography

After his youth in Prussia, he came in 1855 as a fifteen-year-old to the United States, where he lived in Camden, South Carolina and attended medical schools in South Carolina and Virginia, graduating in 1862. He began his medical career as a doctor in the Confederate army and remained in the South until he moved to New York with his family in 1881. During his Civil War service, Baruch was twice briefly captured and imprisoned by Union troops, the second occasion being after the Battle of Gettysburg, where he had been one of only three Confederate surgeons ordered to stay behind to care for some 225 seriously wounded Southern soldiers left in the wake of General Lee's retreat.

After the war he moved to Camden, South Caroline and practiced medicine there until 1881. He then moved to New York City, and became famous for performing an appendectomy for appendicitis. This was supposedly the first time this surgery was performed in the United States.