WILLIAMS, Elkanah, physician, born in Lawrence county, Indiana, 19 December, 1822; died in Hazlewood, Pennsylvania, 5 October, 1888. His father, Isaac Williams, was a captain in the war of 1812 and one of the earliest settlers of Indiana. The son was educated at Bedford seminary, the State university at Bloomington, and at Asbury university, where he was graduated in 1847. He took his medical degree at the University of Louisville in 1850, practised in Indiana, and in 1852-'3 spent eighteen months in the study of ophthalmology in Paris, London, Prague, Vienna, and Berlin. He returned to Cincinnati in 1855 and began practice as a specialist in diseases of the eye and ear, being the first regular physician in the United States to confine his practice strictly to those branches. Soon afterward he became associated as a clinical lecturer in Miami medical college, and in 1860 he was given the chair of ophthalmology, the first of the kind in the United States, and held it for many years. He was ophthalmic surgeon to the Commercial hospital in Cincinnati in 1862-'72, and early in the civil war was appointed assistant surgeon to the United States marine hospital, which post he held till the close of the war. He attended the international ophthalmic congress at Paris in 1862, where he read a paper on "Plusieurs questions de therapeutique," and in 1872 attended a similar meeting at London. In 1876 he was elected president of the ophthalmic congress in New York. Dr. Williams was also elected president of the Ohio state medical society in 1875.