John Jeffries
John Jeffries (born February 5, 1744 in Boston , Province of Massachusetts Bay , † September 16, 1819 there ) was an American doctor and aviation pioneer.
Life
Jeffries studied medicine in London and Aberdeen and graduated from Harvard University in 1763 , where he also received his doctorate in 1769. He then returned to Boston, where he practiced as a doctor and from 1771 to 1774 worked as a ship's doctor on a British ship whose home port was Boston. In the Boston massacre , in which five civilians were shot dead by British troops in a street battle in 1770, he was the main prosecution witness as a doctor to Patric Carr - one of the victims.
During the evacuation of Boston by the British on the occasion of the American Revolutionary War , he accompanied the troops to Halifax , where he was promoted to doctor general and served in the Army of Nova Scotia . In March 1779 he went to Great Britain and became a medical officer for the British troops in America, where he began his service in Charleston (South Carolina) on March 11, 1780 . But in December of the same year he gave up his office and returned to London, where he opened a practice and dealt with scientific, mainly anatomical, research.
Balloon ride over the English Channel
He became known worldwide as an aviation pioneer and "first flying US American" when he crossed the English Channel on January 7, 1785 together with the French balloonist Jean-Pierre Blanchard (1753-1809) in a hydrogen- filled balloon . As early as November 30, 1784 he had ascended with Blanchard in London and had made the world's first targeted meteorological observations from the balloon. In 1786 Jeffries published his report on these trips ( A Narrative of Two Aerial Voyages , German: "A story of two air journeys").
While Blanchard benefited from this event throughout his life, Jeffries quickly fell silent again. In the summer of 1789 he returned to Boston, where he returned to his medical profession and gave the first anatomy lecture in New England. However, the fierce public resistance to dissection at the time forced him to give up this activity. In memory of his pioneering work, Jeffries Peak in Graham Land on the Antarctic Peninsula has been named after him since 1960 .
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| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Jeffries, John |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American doctor and aviation pioneer |
| DATE OF BIRTH | February 5, 1744 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Boston , Massachusetts |
| DATE OF DEATH | September 16, 1819 |
| Place of death | Boston , Massachusetts |