Samuel Claggett Chew

 

Artist: Marie DeFord Keller; Oil on canvas

Samuel Claggett Chew was born in Baltimore on July 26, 1837; son of Samuel Chew. His great-grandfather was Thomas John Claggett, the first Episcopal Bishop of Maryland, and the first bishop of any church to be consecrated in America. Chew graduated from Princeton in 1856, and received an A.M. in 1859; took his M.D. from the University of Maryland in 1858 and settled in practice in Baltimore, living and working there until his death, March 22, 1915, at the age of seventy-five.

His teaching was characterized by varied and profound scholarship. His powers of analysis, his keen sense of the students’ needs and limitations, his fine presence and rich voice made his didactic lectures models of the teacher’s art. He was an exemplar of the gentleman and scholar in medicine, and left his impression on some 4,000 students.

As a public speaker before medical assemblies, Dr. Chew was much in demand, delivering an address on “Medicine in the Past and Future” before the Medical and Chirurgical Faculty of Maryland in 1880, presented the bust of Dr. George W. Miltenberger to the same body in 1896, and giving two addresses at the Centennial celebration of the foundation of the University of Maryland in 1907.

Dr. Chew was one of the authors of “Pepper’s System of Medicine,” and he was the author of “Clinical Lectures on Certain Diseases of the Heart, and on Jaundice,” 1871; “Papers on Medical Jurisprudence,” 1879; “Notes on Thoracentesis,” 1876, besides editing his father’s “Lectures on Medical Education,” in 1864. 

He was president of the Medical and Chirurgical Faculty of Maryland in 1879-80 and in 1898-99, a position his father also held. He was a consulting physician to the Johns Hopkins Hospital, and president of the board of trustees of the Peabody Institute. Dr. Chew's portrait was presented to the Faculty by noted physicians Charles W. Mitchell and William S. Thayer.