Otto Brosius Notebooks

Otto Tiemann Brosius (1886-1964), son of John Brosius, attended St. Louis University from 1904 to 1906 and then worked for the US Naval Hospital Corps from 1906 to 1909 during which time he traveled around the world on the USS Missouri (1907-08). He joined Tufts Medical School as a freshman in 1909 and graduated as valedictorian and class poet with an MD in 1913. After some post-graduate training at the Eye and Ear Department of St. Louis Washington University, he studied at the renown London School of Tropical Medicine in 1915 and became a Fellow of the American College of Physicians in 1926. Brosius worked for 26 years as the medical superintendent of the United Fruit Company (1925-1950 or 1951), for the US government in the Panama Canal Zone (1913-1917) at the Santo Thomas hospital, and as senior physician to a UK-run Colombian syndicate of gold mines (Pato mines, Nechi mines and Constancia mines) from 1917 to 1924.

Brosius published extensively on tropical medicine, including malaria, and in such journals as JAMA, Transactions of the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, Medical Review of Reviews. His 1923 publication in the American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene includes detailed and fascinating patient records of US miners and Colombian natives from the Pato Mines in Barranquilla, Colombia, regarding the use of dioxydiamidoarsenobenzol as a treatment for malaria. He also wrote an almost 500-page manuscript titled 'El Medico' which he sent to President Cousens of Tufts in 1931 for verification of references. It is unclear whether Brosius ever published the manuscript or if it was preserved.

Brosius married to Bertha Regina Curtis on August 26, 1922 and they had two children: Otto Curtis Brosius (1924-), who graduated from Tufts Medical School in 1947, and Barbara Brosius (1923-), who attended Jackson College from 1943 to 1945.