Charles Geraldus Hill

Artist: Marie DeFord Keller; Oil on canvas

Charles Geraldus Hill was born near the town of Louisburg in Franklin County October 31 1849. Dr. Hill read for a time in the office of Dr. J.E. Malone of Louisburg, North Carolina, and in the fall of 1868 entered the Washington University Medical College (now known as the Mercy Hospital ) in Baltimore from which he was graduated in 1870 with the highest honors.

He established a private practice in the small village of Hookstown on the Reisterstown Road but the name of Hookstown did not appeal to him and he succeeded in changing its name to Arlington (just below Northern Parkway, close to Pimlico Racecourse). He had never given up this horseback riding and his erect carriage and his snow white hair was a familiar sight at many of the meets of the fox hunting clubs.

In 1879, he was called to be first assistant physician at the celebrated Mount Hope Retreat for the Insane. In 1881, he became associated with the Baltimore Medical College as lecturer on nervous and mental diseases. In 1882, he was elected professor of anatomy and diseases of the mind and in 1883 was made president of the college with the chair of nervous and mental diseases which he has retained up to the present time

Since 1892 he has been a member and vice president of the board of visitors of the Maryland School for Feebleminded. In 1895, he was elected president of the Medical and Chirurgical Faculty. In 1896, he was president of the Southern Medico Psychological Society. In 1897, he was elected to the presidency of the Baltimore Medical and Surgical Society.

In 1906, at its meeting in Boston, the American Medico-Psychological Association elected him to the presidency. He has had the peculiar distinction of being the president of every local State and national Society of which he has been a member.  Additionally, Dr. Hill discovered a comet on June 23, 1881.