Ashmead, Albert S. (Albert Sydney), 1850-1911.

Albert Sidney Ashmead, leprologist, was born in Philadelphia on 4 Apr. 1850. He married Florence M. Fleming in 1873, then Isabella M. Wale in 1883. Ashmead died after an intestinal operation in Philadelphia on 20 Feb. 1911.

Ashmead received an M.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1869 and practiced medicine until 1873. He was then appointed Foreign Medical Director of the Tokyo Fu Hospital in Japan and taught the first class of students at the Tokyo Charity Hospital's medical school. Ashmead returned to America in 1876 and practiced medicine in Kansas. He moved to New York in 1882 and began his study of leprosy. He helped form the 1897 International Leprosy Congress and was the author of the Platt leper bill which came before the U.S. Senate in 1902. He also pursued research in syphilis, insanity, pellagra, and Asiatic diseases, such as beri-beri. In the 1890s, Ashmead became involved in a dispute with Rudolph Virchow over leprosy in Pre-Columbian Peru.