My Genealogy Hound

HENRY S. CLEMENS, M. D. The city of Allentown is not without her share of members of the learned professions who are a credit to the vocation they have chosen, and to the city itself. Among those who have taken up the calling of a medical practitioner is Dr. Clemens, who devotes himself assiduously to his practice and the scientific investigations which will enhance his professional knowledge and skill. He is well established in reputation as a physician, and is recognized as one of the able practitioners of this section.

Before outlining the life history of our subject it may be well to make a brief record of his parents. His father, Jacob Clemens, was a tanner by trade, but devoted the greater part of his life to farming pursuits, carrying on his agricultural labors in South Bethlehem. He was prominent in his neighborhood, and when he departed this life, in 1872, his loss was widely felt. The grandfather of our subject was Christian Clemens, a native of Doylestown, Bucks County, Pa. Our subject’s mother, Catherine, was the daughter of Jacob and Mary Ott, natives of Pleasant Valley, Bucks County, Pa. She was born in that place November 21, 1811, and died in South Bethlehem, March 11, 1890, when in her seventy-eighth year.

The subject of this sketch was the third in order of birth of a family of eight children, and dates his advent into the world from November 15, 1838. In his boyhood he was a student in the public schools of his native place, and later attended Tremont Seminary and Norristown and Union Seminary, in Union County, Pa. After a short time spent in teaching school in Northampton County, this state, he pursued his studies in the seminary at New Berlin, this state, and in 1857 carried out his long-cherished desire of studying medicine. His first studies were conducted in the office of Dr. Abram Stout, of Bethlehem, later he was with Dr. Kitchen, and then he entered the medical department of the University of Pennsylvania, from which institution he was graduated in 1861. After receiving his diploma he began the practice of his profession in Hosensack, Lehigh County. Later, however, he was numbered among the physicians of Friedensville, where he remained for seven years. He then came to Allentown, where he has since made his home, and where he has built up a lucrative practice.

February 2, 1862, Dr. Clemens was united in marriage with Miss Emelie, daughter of David Hartman. This lady died in Allentown, in October, 1870, after having become the mother of four children. The lady whom our subject chose as his second wife was Miss Elizabeth S. Jones, of Sinking Spring, Berks County, this state.

In politics the Doctor is at heart a Prohibitionist, but has occasionally lent his vote to the Republican party when great issues were at stake. He is of a very religious bent of mind, and at the age of fourteen professed justification in the true Scriptural sense, also sanctification in the true Biblical sense on the 9th of June, 1890. He took the four-years course of theology laid down in the Methodist Episcopal discipline, after which he served for many years as a local preacher in the Methodist Episcopal Church. Later he filled a similar position in the Evangelical Church. He is also a graduate of the Chautauqua School of Theology and the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle. The Deacon’s Orders conferred upon him by Bishop Bowman endowed him with all the functions of the ministry.

One of the chief ambitions of Dr. Clemens is to give advantages to those who have none. In his labors of love he was called upon to preach the Gospel and establish Sabbath-schools in various obscure and neglected places throughout the county of Lehigh, and, as a result of his work, many Sunday-schools were established and chapels built. He served many congregations without fee or earthly reward, and induced the prejudiced to come to Sabbath-school, for in most of the localities the public generally were prejudiced against Methodism. For years, at great personal expense and sacrifice, he gave the children expensive rewards in order to induce them to come to church and Sabbath-school, and thus cultivate a taste for a moral and religious life. In this way he was perhaps one of the greatest philanthropists who ever lived in this community, for he ministered both to the temporal and spiritual wants of the people. Time and eternity alone will reveal the extent of his good deeds. Not only did he preach regularly to his parishioners the Gospel of Jesus Christ, but also, without remuneration, he buried the dead, and baptized and married his people.

When the great split took place in the Evangelical Association, of which he was a member, the Doctor, instead of pandering to the clique of the contestants, or bowing to the whimsical imaginations of the prejudiced, went about far and wide preaching holiness to both sides of the division wherever admitted, claiming that the rod of contention suspended over them by Providence was a chastisement to drive them back to the true foundation. God having sent Luther into the world to revive the Bible doctrine of justification by faith, and John Wesley to revive the Bible doctrine of sanctification by faith, these doctrines the Doctor maintained (he was cradled in them from childhood) were the true foundation upon which the Evangelical Association was based; and for wandering from this old and true foundation the people were being punished, and they must get back to it again, or they will gradually degenerate and become contemporary with the other spiritually dead churches.

Nor was the Doctor less active in temperance than in religious work. He traveled through this county and elsewhere establishing divisions, circulating temperance literature, and lecturing without any remuneration whatever. In the Sabbath-school, also, he inculcated in the minds of the children his own strict temperance principles, thus aiding them to start aright in the world. As a physician he was prominent, and had a large and profitable practice in the county, until he made chronic diseases a specialty, when his fame spread throughout the United States. He has treated patients also from Canada and Europe. Early in life he made a special study of the lungs, and pneumonia was the subject of his thesis when he was graduated from the University of Pennsylvania, at Philadelphia, in 1861.

Probably no other physician has done as much as has Dr. Clemens to demonstrate the value of oxygen as a therapeutic agent He manufactured it of the sesqui-oxide of iron in combinations with various other chemicals, all the particulars of which he specifies in his will to his wife and children, so as to make it perpetual. He discovered that by combining various chemical gases and medicated vapors a system of therapeutics could be established effectual in nearly all diseases, and which could be administered by inhalation alone, this being more potent in effect than by stomach medication. By throwing remedies into the circulation by the medium of the lungs he discovered that they acted more effectively than by sending them into the circulation (where all curative agents must go) through the stomach. He was the first to discover that from twenty to thirty pounds of beef could be forced into the circulation in the form of essence, by compelling or increasing the powers of assimilation, which is a great boon in all wasting diseases. He was also the first to discover that the vital calibre of the lungs could be enlarged from seventy to one hundred, two hundred, three hundred, or even four hundred, cubic inches in consumptives, who are not too far gone in the work of decay in all tuberculous affections, by inhaling oxygen in various combinations.

These two facts, the Doctor says, are part of the secrets of his great success in restoring consumptives or all persons suffering from wasting diseases. It is a discovery of the Doctor’s that the heart can be shrunk by inhaling oxygen in various combinations in cases of hypertrophy; that all tumors can be scattered by increasing the power of both secretion and excretion, and restoring every function to normal action by the oxygen treatment. He also discovered that all brain workers, who keep up a good physique by taxing the muscles as well as the brain, can greatly increase the powers of brain function or capabilities by an occasional inhalation of oxygen, whether they are sick or well. When the brain is not too much compressed, occasional inhalations of oxygen will so elevate and refine the higher and finer functions of the brain as to make a Christian (especially a minister) capable of expounding any subject wherewith he may be familiar almost with the eloquence of an angel, so that his influence will be increased two-fold. Man’s brain, when treated physically by oxygen in a proper manner, can be subjected to enormous strain and lifted to heights of ecstatic rapture in men of intellect, addicted to no bad habits. This is a discovery that Dr. Clemens has made after many experiments and extended experience. Oxygen, he thinks, is yet in its infancy as a therapeutic agent.