Henry Hodgen Mudd
Henry Hodgen Mudd was born in Pittsfield, Illinois in 1844. In 1856 his family moved to St. Louis, where Mudd attended public schools and then Washington University. Mudd matriculated to the St. Louis Medical College and studied under his uncle Dr. John T. Hodgen; he received his medical degree in 1866. After an internship at St. Louis City Hospital and two years of service as acting assistant surgeon in the Thirteenth United States Infantry, Hodgen began a medical practice with his uncle in 1869.
Mudd’s interests lay in anatomy and surgery and he soon began the demonstration and teaching of both. Mudd joined the faculty of the St. Louis Medical College in 1872. He became demonstrator of Anatomy there in 1874; the following year he was appointed to the same position at the affiliated Missouri Dental College. In 1880 Mudd was given the rank of professor at both schools, serving over the years as professor of Anatomy, Clinical Surgery, and Surgical Anatomy. The faculty of the Missouri Dental College selected Mudd as their dean in 1878, a position he held until his death in 1899. Mudd simultaneously was dean of the St. Louis Medical College from 1896 until his death.
Mudd’s ties to Washington University and the subsequent election of the University’s chancellor, William Greenleaf Eliot, to the Missouri Dental College board of trustees helped lead to the affiliation of the dental school with the University in 1892. Mudd, though not a dentist, was recognized by his colleagues after his death as “a man of marked executive ability, possessed of great firmness and uprightness of character who commanded the respect and esteem of the entire Dental Profession.”