Starting his career in Connecticut, he also practiced surgery in Massachusetts before moving to New York City in 1850, where he became a general and orthopedic surgeon.
He worked with major antislavery figures, including Abby Kelley, Wendell Phillips, Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, Isaac Hopper, Samuel May and Lewis Hayden.
[2] During the American Civil War, Hudson was appointed by the U.S. government to fit apparatus to persons suffering special cases of gunshot injuries of bone, resections, ununited fractures, and amputations at the knee- and ankle-joints.
He invented several prosthetic and orthopedic appliances to aid in such efforts, and his works received awards at the Exposition Universelle of Paris in 1867, and at the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia.
Professionally he published numerous reported cases in the Medical and Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion (Washington, 1870–72).