Charles Bingham Penrose

Penrose was born in Philadelphia. He was a descendant of Bartholemew Penrose, who had settled in the city in 1698, establishing a shipyard at the invitation of William Penn that stayed in the Penrose family for 150 years. Charles Penrose's father, Richard Allen Fullerton (R. A. F.) Penrose Sr., was a physician, an obstetrics professor at the University of Pennsylvania and one of the founders of the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. His mother, Sarah Hannah Boies Penrose, had come from Maryland and was the adopted granddaughter of an affluent Boston merchant.

The younger Penrose was taught by private tutors and later attended Episcopal Academy. When he was 19 years old, Penrose earned an undergraduate physics degree from Harvard College. He was then concurrently enrolled in medical school at the University of Pennsylvania and in a physics Ph.D. program at Harvard; he graduated from both in 1884. He finished medical school one year behind Amos W. Barber; the two became friends at Penn and Barber later became the acting governor of Wyoming. In 1886 and 1887, Penrose was a resident physician at Pennsylvania Hospital.

Penrose founded the Gynecean Hospital, the first hospital in Philadelphia that was exclusively for women, and he became known among his colleagues for his surgical skill. He advocated for the use of drainage tubes in abdominal surgery at a time when most of his fellow surgeons had been reluctant to use them, and he made a presentation on the topic before the American Medical Association in 1889. Since drains with rubber tubing could cause damage to the tissues while they were in place or during removal, Penrose designed an improvement in 1890 that involved a condom with its tip cut off. The Penrose drain became the dominant surgical drain until suction drainage was introduced a few years later.

After contracting tuberculosis in 1891, Penrose left his Philadelphia medical practice. On the advice of his friend Barber, who was by then the acting governor of Wyoming, Penrose came to that state, and Barber had him put up at the exclusive Cheyenne Club. Penrose placed himself on a regimen of physical activity involving digging with a pick and shovel in the morning, and horseback riding in the afternoon. By early the next year, he had gained 20 pounds.

While at the Cheyenne Club, Penrose agreed to serve as the surgeon on an invasion led by a group of cattlemen, the Wyoming Stock Growers Association. The cattlemen were responding to the perceived threats posed by smaller settlers in the state. The conflict became known as the Johnson County War.

Penrose was friends with the novelist Owen Wister, whose most well-known work was The Virginian, a fictionalized version of the events of the Johnson County War. Penrose wrote a letter to Wister during the conflict, and in doing so, he may have inspired the most well-known line in The Virginian ("You son-of-a--"). He had written in his letter that "during the last two months 'son of a bitch' has been a favorite expression in this country. Wyoming is in the son of a bitch stage of her civilization and count not get on any more without it than she could without a lariat and a branding iron."

When two alleged cattle rustlers, Nate Champion and Nick Ray, were ambushed and killed by a group of the cattlemen, Penrose was among the suspects arrested. Penrose was taken to Douglas, Wyoming, where lynching was briefly considered. Governor Barber, who had also been a longtime friend of the cattlemen, intervened; he had Penrose brought back to the Cheyenne Club by a U.S. marshal on a writ of habeas corpus. Penrose was ultimately cleared of responsibility in the attack.

Penrose wrote a memoir, The Rustler Business, about the events in Wyoming. Author John W. Davis wrote that Penrose's account is especially valuable because he was not entirely familiar with the official opinions held by the group of cattlemen. Penrose parroted some of the myths that were widely held by the group, such as the thought that Cattle Kate needed to be killed in the interests of the country. However, Penrose also wrote things that were inconsistent with the line advanced by big cattlemen, such as the admission that the cattleman invaders had started north with the goal of targeting 70 specific people, including Nate Champion.

Returning to Philadelphia, Penrose was named Professor of Gynecology for the medical school at Penn in 1893, succeeding William Goodell. He authored the Text-Book on Diseases of Women, and he held the professorship at Penn until he retired from medical practice in 1899.

Penrose also had a professional interest in animals. He established the Penrose Research Laboratory at the Philadelphia Zoo in 1901, the first zoological laboratory located inside an American zoo. The lab conducted important research into the prevention of tuberculosis and studied the impact of diet on animal fertility and on the richness of animal coats. In the foreword to Disease in Captive Wild Mammals and Birds (1923), he decried the fact that most animal diseases were poorly understood, especially relative to the progress that had been made in human medicine.

In 1911, Penrose was named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and he belonged to several sections of the organization. For many years he served as the president of the Zoological Society of Philadelphia.

Penrose, who stood six feet tall with an athletic build, was very physically active as a young man, having once traveled on horseback from Philadelphia to Niagara Falls and back. On another occasion, he swam 15 miles in the ocean in five hours. On a hunting trip in Montana, he killed a bear cub and was nearly mauled to death by the cub's mother, escaping only after he shot the bear in the throat. Penrose was left with bones protruding from his wrist, and he performed surgery on himself that kept his hand intact.

Penrose married Katharine Drexel, the daughter of Philadelphia philanthropist Joseph William Drexel. The couple had a daughter named Sarah in 1896, and they had a son named Charles who was born in 1900 and died the next year. Their third child, Boies Penrose (1902–1976), became an author and travel historian. Katharine Drexel was known in Philadelphia as a member of the anti-suffragism movement. She died in 1918.

In addition to Penrose's father and youngest son, several of his relatives were well-known. His grandfather, Charles B. Penrose, was a Pennsylvania state senator who first introduced the "unit rule" at political party conventions to ensure that the Whig Party nominated William Henry Harrison for president over Henry Clay in 1839. His brothers included Boies Penrose, a Pennsylvania state legislator and U.S. senator who identified Warren G. Harding as a presidential candidate; R. A. F. "Dick" Penrose, a mining engineer and president of the Geological Society of America; and Spencer Penrose, a geologist, philanthropist and builder of the Colorado hotel known as The Broadmoor.

Penrose spent the winter of 1924–25 attempting to recover his health in Aiken, South Carolina. He made what was supposed to be a brief trip back to Philadelphia to visit relatives, and he was accompanied by two nurses and a cousin named Sarah. He was found dead of a suspected heart attack in his drawing room on the train near Washington, D.C. on February 28, 1925. He left most of his million-dollar estate to his two children, and he left $100,000 to Mary Devinnie, a nurse who had cared for him late in his life.