Early medical practice Hamilton received his medical education at the
College of Physicians and Surgeons at
Columbia University, graduating in 1870. Specializing in "nervous diseases", Hamilton was one of the first medical practitioners in America to use electricity for
cauterization; his text on
Clinical Electro-Therapeutics was published in 1873. During his early years of practice, he was the doctor to much of the old New York society that lived about
Washington Square, lower
Fifth Avenue and
St. John's Park. In 1874, he presented a paper titled
Suicide in Large Cities, with Reference to Certain Sanitary Conditions which tend to Prevent its Moral and Physical Causes at the Health Congress of the
American Public Health Association in Philadelphia. In this paper, he argued that suicides were more strongly felt in metropolitan areas due to the use of intoxicating drinks or narcotics, nervous disease, seduction, immoral habits, and disappointment.
Public medical work By the 1880s, Hamilton had become well known as an "
alienist", an archaic term that was then used to describe a
psychiatrist or
psychologist. He was an early expert in what is now known as
forensic psychology, including evaluating defendants to determine their competency to stand trial. From 1900 to 1903, Hamilton was a professor of mental diseases at
Cornell University Medical College. Hamilton always maintained that Guiteau was perfectly sane and a "shrewd scamp". • In 1907 Hamilton was asked by George Washington Glover II to evaluate his mother,
Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of
Christian Science, to determine whether she could manage her own affairs as part of a lawsuit called the "
Next Friends suit". Hamilton met personally with Eddy to evaluate her and remained in occasional correspondence during the suit. Hamilton told
The New York Times that the attacks on Eddy were the result of "a spirit of religious persecution that has at last quite overreached itself", and that "there seems to be a manifest injustice in taxing so excellent and capable an old lady as Mrs. Eddy with any form of insanity." Dr. Edward French, who was with Hamilton, agreed with his assessment, finding "not the least evidence of mental weakness or incompetency."
Honors In the late 1890s, Hamilton appears to have visited Scotland, where in 1899 he was elected a
Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. His proposers were Sir
James Crichton-Browne, Sir
Thomas Grainger Stewart, Sir
John Batty Tuke and Sir
James Dewar. In 1912, he received an honorary
LLD degree from
Hamilton College on the centennial celebration of the college which was named after his grandfather. ==Personal life==