Durnford, Andrew (1800–12 July 1859), free man of color, planter, and physician, was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, the son of Thomas Durnford, an English immigrant and merchant, and Rosaline Mercier, a free woman of color. Thomas Durnford was a cousin of Colonel Elias Durnford (1739–1794) of the Royal Engineers, lieutenant governor of British West Florida. Andrew Durnford, reared by parents who were denied marriage by law, grew up in New Orleans’s free colored community with the comforts afforded the family of a successful merchant and speculator. His schooling, like most of his early life, is a matter of conjecture. In his adult years he revealed a working knowledge of written and spoken English and French, the rudiments of elementary arithmetic, and medical procedures. He apparently passed freely between the white community with his father and the free colored community with his mother and her family. For example, John McDonogh, a successful merchant and planter of New Orleans and Baltimore, had business ties with both Durnford and his white father. In 1825 Durnford married fifteen-year-old Marie Charlotte Remy, a free woman of color; they had four children, three of whom lived to adulthood. Thomas Durnford died in 1826, two weeks before his namesake, Thomas McDonogh Durnford, was born. In 1828 Andrew Durnford left New Orleans to build a plantation on lands purchased from McDonogh, where he resided until his death....
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Durnford, Andrew (1800-1859), free man of color, planter, and physician
David O. Whitten
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Favill, Henry Baird (1860-1916), physician, civic leader, and farmer
William K. Beatty
Favill, Henry Baird (14 August 1860–20 February 1916), physician, civic leader, and farmer, was born in Madison, Wisconsin, the son of John Favill, a physician, and Louise Sophia Baird. Through his mother, Favill descended from the Ottawa chief, Kewinoquot (“Returning Cloud”), and took pride in this ancestry. Henry received his early education in the Madison schools, graduating from high school in 1876. He entered the University of Wisconsin that fall, took the classical course, and received his B.A. in 1880. Although his father had taken his M.D. at the Harvard Medical School, Favill entered Rush Medical College in the fall of 1880. For two years he served as prosector to Charles T. Parkes, professor of anatomy. His grades were so high that in his senior year he filled in at Cook County and St. Luke’s hospitals for several interns when they were ill or on vacation and so obtained valuable practical experience. He received his M.D. in 1883....
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Marsh, John (1799-1856), California ranchero and physician
Michael Magliari
Marsh, John (05 June 1799–24 September 1856), California ranchero and physician, was born in Danvers, Massachusetts, the son of John Marsh and Mary “Polly” Brown, farmers. After graduating from Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, in 1819, Marsh received his B.A. from Harvard in 1823. That year he accepted an appointment as a tutor at Fort St. Anthony (later Fort Snelling), in Michigan Territory. For two years Marsh taught school and studied medicine under the guidance of Edward Purcell, the post surgeon. Purcell died without giving his apprentice a certificate, but this did not prevent Marsh from successfully practicing medicine years later in California....
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Palmer, Daniel David (1845-1913), founder of chiropractic
Russell W. Gibbons
Palmer, Daniel David (07 March 1845–20 October 1913), founder of chiropractic, was born in a log cabin on the shore of Lake Scugog, about thirty miles west of Toronto, Canada, the son of Thomas Palmer, a rural Ontario teacher and postmaster, and Catherine McVay. Growing up on the harsh Ontario frontier when Upper Canada was still a crown colony of the British Empire, Palmer had few opportunities for advancement. He wrote that “I was cradled in a piece of hemlock bark” by his German-English father. In 1865, while the Civil War was still raging in the United States, Daniel and his older brother Thomas left home to seek employment in one of the port cities of the Great Lakes. According to Thomas Palmer’s autobiography, they walked for thirty days before reaching Buffalo “with their meager belongings packed in a carpet bag and two dollars borrowed from friends.”...
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Smith, Ashbel (1805-1886), surgeon general and secretary of state of the Republic of Texas, physician, and businessman
Carl H. Moneyhon
Smith, Ashbel (13 August 1805–21 January 1886), surgeon general and secretary of state of the Republic of Texas, physician, and businessman, was born in Hartford, Connecticut, the son of Moses Smith, Jr., a hatmaker, and Phoebe Adams. Smith attended the Hartford public schools, and in 1823 he entered Yale, where he was a member of Phi Beta Kappa and received both his B.A. and M.A. by the end of his first year. To pay college debts he taught school in Salisbury, North Carolina, between 1824 and 1826, then returned to the North to study medicine. After receiving his medical degree from Yale in 1828, he established a practice in Salisbury....
