One of the founding fathers of modern American anthropology, Daniel Garrison Brinton was born in 1837 in Thornbury Township, Pennsylvania. He worked as a surgeon during the American Civil War in the Union Army and was the surgeon-in-charge during 1864-65 of the U.S. Army general hospital at Quincy, Illinois. He practiced medicine after the war, and from 1874 to 1887, edited The Medical and Surgical Reporter, a weekly periodical, in Philadelphia. In 1884, Brinton worked at the Academy of Natural Sciences, Philadelphia, as a professor of ethnology and archaeology, and then, in 1886, joined the University of Pennsylvania as a professor of archaeology and American linguistics. Brinton was a member of several intellectual societies. He also wrote numerous brochures, articles, pamphlets, addresses, and books. Notes on the Floridian Peninsula (1859), The Myths of the New World (1868), American Hero Myths (1882), and The Pursuit of Happiness (1893) are some of his works.