NOU Founding Ornithologist, Hypnotist, Physician: Isador Trostler

Authors

Rick Wright, Nebraska Ornithologists' Union

Date of this Version

12-2023

Document Type

Article

Citation

Nebraska Bird Review, volume 91, number 4, December 2023, pp. 149–155.

Comments

Published by the Nebraska Ornithologists’ Union, Inc.

Abstract

Eminent radiologist Benjamin H. Orndoff, eulogizing an esteemed colleague some months after his death, noted that Isador Simon Trostler (1869–1957) “as a lad . . . became interested in ornithology and herpetology, sending accounts of his observations and explorations to natural history magazines up to the late [18]90s.” Understandably more interested in Trostler’s role as a “pioneer in radiology,” Orndoff had no more to say about the natural history pursuits of one of Nebraska’s most notable early ornithologists, one of the founders 125 years ago of the Nebraska Ornithologists’ Union.

Conversely, we birders have known little or nothing of Trostler’s life and activities after his departure from Nebraska in 1907. Even Wilson Tout (1876–1951), a fellow charter member, who claimed to have developed “a warm friendship” with Trostler in the earliest days of the NOU, was in possession of only the most fragmentary, and not thoroughly accurate, knowledge of his subsequent career. In his biographical sketch of the founders, published on the occasion of the NOU’s semicentennial jubilee, Tout could report only that Trostler “later completed a medical course in Omaha and in Chicago and located in the east, perhaps in Buffalo or Ithaca, New York.” In Nebraska, Trostler vanished so thoroughly from birderly memory that he was believed to have predeceased Wilson and Nell Tout (1878–1942), “the last surviving charter members of [the] NOU,” both of whom in fact he handily outlived.

As it turns out, Trostler’s activities, in Nebraska and in Chicago, as a birder and as an innovative radiologist, are somewhat better documented than either Orndoff or Tout—or any of the rest of us—could know. And a look at the sources reveals an unsuspected continuity between his activities as a busy amateur natural historian and his subsequent professional career in medicine, a connection grounded in those pursuits’ shared focus on making the otherwise hidden visible.