1. David Hosack remains widely known as the doctor who tended to the fatal injuries of Alexander Hamilton after his duel with Aaron Burr in July 1804, and who had similarly tended to Hamilton's son Philip after his fatal 1801 duel with George Eacker.
David Hosack established several institutions including Elgin Botanic Garden and a medical school at Rutgers University.
David Hosack would go on to attend Columbia College, now a branch of Columbia University, where he began as a student of art, but eventually became fascinated by medicine.
At Columbia, David Hosack entered into a medical apprenticeship with Dr Richard Bayley.
David Hosack graduated from Princeton with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1789.
David Hosack married in early 1791, and that spring he received his medical degree from the University of Pennsylvania.
Well received by some of the leading scientific minds of the period, David Hosack spent much of his time in their botanical gardens and lecture halls.
David Hosack ultimately became one of the leading American scholars of botany.
David Hosack returned to America by 1796 and established a practice in New York City.
David Hosack was the family doctor of Alexander Hamilton and his family, and is perhaps best known as the doctor present during Hamilton's duel with Aaron Burr in Weehawken, New Jersey on July 11,1804.
David Hosack had treated Hamilton's son Philip after he was fatally shot by George Eacker in a duel at the same location in 1801.
At Alexander Hamilton's funeral, David Hosack was one of the pallbearers.
David Hosack loaned Burr money for passage on a ship to Europe, where Burr lived for several years in self-imposed exile to escape his creditors and the notoriety resulting from the trial.
David Hosack was the creator in 1801 of America's first botanical garden, the Elgin Botanic Garden, which he modeled after gardens he had seen in Scotland and named for the garden in his father's birthplace.
One of David Hosack's most distinguished students was a celebrated New York City physician, John Franklin Gray, who later became the first practitioner of homeopathy in the United States.
In 1798, following a yellow fever epidemic, David Hosack proposed opening the first lying-in hospital in New York, a maternity clinic where he could offer health care to poor pregnant women.
David Hosack raised funds from subscribers, including Alexander Hamilton, to purchase a house on Cedar Street where the Lying-In Hospital opened in 1799.
David Hosack successfully pursued an alliance with Rutgers College, bringing his group of colleagues to New Brunswick, New Jersey.
In 1801, David Hosack created the Elgin Botanic Garden, named for his father's Scottish birthplace.
David Hosack's funds were insufficient to support such a project indefinitely, and it was suggested that he was so preoccupied with his endeavors in the creation of Rutgers Medical College that he had neither time nor money to continue the garden.
Early in 1791, shortly before receiving his medical degree, David Hosack married Catharine Warner, whom he had met while studying at Princeton.
Shortly after David Hosack returned from Scotland to America, his son died.
David Hosack became an advocate for the betterment of lives of the poor, which led him to become a founder of the Humane Society.
Close to two years after his first wife died, David Hosack married a Philadelphia woman, Mary Eddy, a sister of Thomas Eddy, a prominent Philadelphia philanthropist and prison reformer.
David and Mary Hosack had nine children, seven of whom survived to adulthood.
David Hosack was one of the founders of the New-York Historical Society, and its fourth president.
David Hosack was a president of the Literary and Philosophical Society of New York.
David Hosack was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1810, the American Antiquarian Society in 1814, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences the following year.
David Hosack died of a stroke one week afterward, on December 22,1835, and was buried at New York Marble Cemetery.
In 1888, David Hosack's descendants had him reinterred at Trinity Church Cemetery, where Alexander Hamilton is buried.