Nathan Ryno Smith

Artist: Harper Pennington, oil on canvas

Nathan Ryno Smith, born in Cornish, New Hampshire in 1797, was tutored in Virginia and earned his MD degree from Yale in 1823. He was the son of Dr. Nathan Smith, a distinguished surgeon and founder of Dartmouth and Yale College Medical Schools. The younger Smith founded the medical department at the University of Vermont, where he was also professor of surgery and anatomy. He also taught at Jefferson Medical College.

A leading surgeon of his era, Smith accepted the chair of surgery at the University of Maryland in 1827, commencing an eventful, 50-year career in Baltimore. Considered a bold and skillful operator, Smith was known to his students as “The Emperor.” His removal of a goiter from a patient was the first procedure of its kind in Maryland and only the second thyroidectomy in the country. 

Smith was widely recognized as the inventor of the anterior splint for fractures of the lower extremities. The device was perfected in 1860 and adapted for general use in America and abroad. A valuable tool for the treatment of compound fractures, the splint was used extensively during the Civil War.

Smith himself regarded the invention as his most important contribution to medicine. Held in high esteem by his contemporaries, Smith was lauded in Gross’ A Century of American Surgery as “one of the greatest surgeons America has produced.” Founder of the Philadelphia Monthly Journal of Medicine and Surgery, later named the American Journal of the Medical Sciences. Smith was a prolific writer and contributor to medical literature. Nathan Smith died in 1877.

University of Maryland Medical School – The Deans