Baruch
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
BERNARD MANNES, an American financier and public official. He graduated from the College of the City of New York in 1899. For many years he was a member of the New York Stock Exchange and acquired a large fortune. In 1915 he was appointed by President Wilson a member of the Advisory Commission of the Council of National Defense. He was also a member of the Commission on Raw Materials, Minerals and Metals, and a member of the commission in charge of purchases for the War Industries Board. He was appointed chairman of the War Industries Board in 1918. During the negotiations of the peace treaty in Paris he acted as financial adviser to the American delegates. - BARUCH, SIMON, an American physician, born at Schwersenz, Germany, in 1840. He received his early education in Germany. Removing to the United States he graduated from the Medical College of Virginia in 1862. He was surgeon in the Confederate Army until 1865, and was captured during this service. Following the war, he practiced medicine in Camden, S. C., until 1881, when he removed to New York and became consulting physician on chronic diseases. He diagnosed the first recorded case of perforating appendicitis and successfully operated on it. He was instrumental in introducing free municipal baths in New York City. For many years he was on the medical staff of the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia, and was one of the most noted physicians of the United States. He was the author of "Uses of Water in Modern Medicine" (1892); "The Principles and Practice of Hydrotherapy." In 1913 a hospital was erected in his honor at Camden, S. C.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
When Collier's wrote this in 1921, Bernard Baruch was known chiefly as the Wall Street speculator who had run the War Industries Board; he was 50 and had four more decades of public life ahead of him. He advised Roosevelt and Truman, and in 1946 presented the Baruch Plan to the new United Nations Atomic Energy Commission, proposing international control of atomic weapons aviet Union rejected it. He became a national figure as the "park bench statesman," holding court in Lafayette Square and Central Park, and died in 1965 at 94. His father Simon, described here in the present tense, died in June 1921, the year of this volume; the appendicitis and hydrotherapy work summarized above is still how he is remembered.
Written for this edition, 2026.