Presidents

Methodist Preacher, Physician, and Scientist

Alexander Means
1801-1883

President 1854-1855

Polymathic and energetic in a way that the early nineteenth century seems to have demanded, Alexander Means began his career as a school teacher in Georgia but followed his immense curiosity into medicine, electronics, and ministry. At age twenty-four, having decided to become a physician, he rode on horseback through Indian territory to Transylvania University in Kentucky, where he studied medicine for a year. Shortly afterward, while practicing medicine in Covington, Georgia, he was granted a local preacher's license by the Methodist Episcopal Church.

The two great interests of Means's life—science and religion—came together naturally in the third, education. When, in 1834, the Georgia Conference established the Manual Labor School, it must have come as great relief to have so close at hand a person who combined the life of the mind and the spirit so ably. Means was chosen as the school's first superintendent. He served in that role until 1838, when he resigned to become professor of natural sciences in Emory College in its first year of instruction.

It is doubtful that a more advanced scientific mind could have been found for the science professorship at Emory in those days. Traveling in England in 1851, he became acquainted with the experiments of Michael Faraday, and on his return to Oxford he exhibited in his Emory laboratory what many regard as the first electric light in America. More imaginative than strictly inventive, he is said to have predicted the phonograph and the electric engine two decades before their invention.

That his original interest in medicine never flagged is clear from the apparently torturous schedule he kept from 1841 to 1858. Although he held the sciences chair at Emory from 1838 until his resignation of the presidency of the college in 1855, he was granted permission simultaneously to lecture in chemistry during the winter terms at Augusta Medical College from 1841 to 1858, and in 1853 he was elected president of the Southern Masonic Female College in Covington, a position he resigned the following year to accept the presidency of Emory. In 1855 he proposed that Emory should assume the property and charter of Oglethorpe Medical College, then a school of Oglethorpe University, and manage it as one of Emory's departments, a proposal that the trustees "respectfully declined."

After serving as president for one semester, Means petitioned the board for permission to accept a professorship in the Atlanta Medical College, to which the trustees assented with some reservation. A year later, the trustees' dissatisfaction with an arrangement that greatly distracted their president from his primary duties prompted Means to resign, effective December 1855. Means himself continued to alternate his teaching between the medical colleges in Atlanta, during the summer, and Augusta, during the winter. His later career continued to be distinguished by scientific work, and he was eventually elected a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He died at the age of eighty-three in Oxford and is buried there.

Source: A Legacy of Heart and Mind: Emory Since 1836. Gary S. Hauk, PhD