American medical doctor in Baltimore. Howard A. Kelly was a pioneering gynaecologist and surgeon but was also interested in natural history and was responsible for producing a flora of Delaware County, Pennsylvania. Kelly was born in Camden, New Jersey, and developed an interest in biology during his childhood. Attending the University of Pennsylvania from 1873 he served as president of the Franklin Scientific Society before his graduation in 1877. Moving on to study at the university's Medical School he was awarded a medical doctorate in 1882. This was after having taken several years leave, during which he worked as a cowboy in Colorado and directed the Rothrock School of Physical Culture, the first private camp in America.

He began to practise medicine at the Episcopal Hospital in Kensington, Philadelphia, before founding his own small hospital in 1887 which went on to become the Kensington Hospital for Women. It was here that he made a name for himself by performing abdominal surgery thought at the time to be impossible. In 1888 Kelly briefly returned to the University of Pennsylvania as Assistant Professor of Obstetrics at the Medical School, before gaining employment as Professor of Obstetrics and Gynaecology at John Hopkins Hospital and School of Medicine. Remaining at this institution for the rest of his life, he was one of the founding members of the Howard A. Kelly Hospital and the American College of Surgeons.

Kelly introduced the use of cocaine as an anaesthetic and radium to treat cancer. An evangelical fundamental Christian, he took it upon himself to fight for election reforms and against gambling and prostitution, even working to rehabilitate former ladies of that industry.

As a botanist Kelly was initially interested in general floristics and collected in Pennsylvania while based there. Later he began to study fungi and lichens, developing a particularly fine collection of mycological literature, letters, manuscripts and illustrations. This collection, as well as a smaller lichenological library and fungi and lichen specimens, were donated to the herbarium of the University of Michigan. Kelly was also interested in other aspects of natural history, including herpetology, and was named Honorary Curator of Reptiles and Amphibians in the University of Michigan's Museum of Zoology. A prolific writer, Kelly published numerous medical papers as well as text books on gynaecology and abdominal surgery. He was also particularly interested in the lives of medics and medical botanists and produced Some American medical botanists in 1914. Married to Lactita Bredon the couple had nine children, and a menagerie of snakes and other reptiles they kept as pets. Kelly was awarded honorary Doctor of Laws degrees from several institutions, both in the USA and in the UK, and is remembered as one of the founding four doctors of John Hopkins Hospital and the father of gynaecology as a medical profession.

Sources:
B.B. Kanouse, 1943, "Doctor Howard Atwood Kelly", Mycologia, 35(4): 383-384
Howard Atwood Kelly (1858-1943), Penn Biographies, University of Pennsylvania Archives and Records Center:
http://www.archives.upenn.edu/people/1800s/kelly_howard_atwood.html, accessed 8 July 2011
The four founding physicians, John Hopkins Medicine:
http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/about/history/history5.html, accessed 8 July 2011.