Howard Atwood Kelly (February 20, 1858 – January 12, 1943) was a distinguished American gynecologist, born at Camden, N. J., and educated at the University of Pennsylvania, where he graduated B.A. in 1877 and M.D. in 1882, and where he was associate professor of obstetrics in 1888-89. While in Philadelphia he founded Kensington Hospital. He was professor of gynecology and obstetrics at Johns Hopkins University from 1889 to 1899 and after the latter year — when he became also gynecological surgeon in Johns Hopkins Hospital — of gynecology alone. High attainments in his special field brought Dr. Kelly many honors — he received the degree of (LL.D.) from Aberdeen and Washington and Lee universities and from the University of Pennsylvania; served as president of the Southern Surgical and Gynecological Society in 1907 and of the American Gynecological Society in 1912; and was elected fellow or honorary member of English, Scottish, French, German, Austrian, and Italian obstetrical and gynecological societies. Besides contributing some 300 valuable articles to medical journals and editing, with C. P. Noble, Gynecology and Abdominal Surgery (volume i, 1907; volume ii, 1908), he published:

• Operative Gynecology (two volumes, 1899)
• The Vermiform Appendix and its Diseases (1905, 1909)
• Walter Reed and Yellow Fever (1906, 1907)
• Medical Gynecology (1908)
• Gynecology and abdominal surgery with Charles P Noble (1908)
• Myomata of the Uterus, with T. S. Cullen (1909)
• Cyclopœdia of American Medical Biography (1912)
• American Medical Botanists (1913)
• Diseases of the Kidneys, Ureters, and Bladder, with C. F. Burnam, (two volumes, 1914)
• Dictionary of American medical biography; lives of eminent physicians of the United States and Canada, from the earliest times with Walter L. Burrage (1928)
• Electrosurgery with Grant E. Ward (1932)

Eponyms

• Kelly's sign — if the ureter is teased with an artery forceps, it will contract like a snake or worm
• Kelly speculum — a rectal speculum tubular in shape and fitted with an obturator

Dorland's Medical Dictionary (1938)

• Kelly clamp - large haemostatic forceps; arguably among the most common and best known surgical instruments ever

External links

• See Snopes entry on "glass of milk" anecdote
• "Great Town Character". Time Magazine. Retrieved on 2008-08-10. in Time Magazine January 25, 1943.