Baltimore City

Ashton Alexander                      

Founder and first secretary of the Medical and Chirurgical Faculty of Maryland, provost of the University of Maryland, Ashton Alexander was born in 1772, near Arlington, Alexandria County, Virginia. The town of Alexandria was named after his ancestors, who owned large tracts of land in its vicinity. His father commanded a company of horses in the Continental Army at the commencement of the Revolution. 

His youth was spent in Jefferson County, Virginia, where he was educated at a private institution and studied medicine under Dr. Philip Thomas, of Frederick, Md., finishing at the University of Pennsylvania, where he obtained his medical degree May 22, 1795. He settled first in North Carolina and in 1796 went to Baltimore. He was a founder of the Medical and Chirurgical Faculty of Maryland and its first secretary (1799–1801); then he was treasurer (1801–1803) and the last surviving founding member.

He married in December, 1799, a daughter of his preceptor, Dr. Thomas, and had eight children, only three of whom survived to maturity and all of whom died before he did. His first wife died, he married again very late in life to a Miss Merryman, but had no children.

Other positions Dr. Alexander held were: Commissioner of Health, Baltimore, 1804–05 and again 1812; attending physician, Baltimore General Dispensary, 1801–03; consulting physician, Baltimore Hospital, 1812; president, District Medical and Chirurgical Society, 1819–20, provost, University of Maryland, 1837–50.

Dr. Alexander is described as being a self-possessed and courteous man, neat in his dress which included knee and shoe buckles and gold-headed cane. He died of pneumonia in Baltimore in February 1855, his eighty-third year, and was the last living founder.

     Source: Medical Annals of Maryland (1899)

In 1835, the estate, “Pretty Prospect" was sold to Dr. Ashton Alexander by Richard Johnson, a wealthy mill-owner. Ashton Alexander may have been acquainted with the Johnson family in Frederick, as Roger Johnson and Ashton Alexander both had Quaker wives who were distant cousins. Alexander moved to Baltimore, MD in 1796, where he practiced medicine for more than forty years.  Since Dr. Alexander never resided in Washington, DC, it is unclear why he purchased "Pretty Prospect".

By 1841, when he placed an advertisement in the newspaper offering the property for lease or sale, he was using the house as a rental property. “It has undergone three years of deterioration by the worst treatment by those who unfortunately tenanted. The proofs of which are grievously visible at a glance. And for the whole three years not a dollar, so far, has been received for damages or rent.” The property had also been owned by President John Quincy Adams and is now the site of the National Zoo in Washington, DC.

     Source: Smithsonian Institute – History of the National Zoo’s Property, Formerly Pretty Prospect

 

George Buchanan                      

George Buchanan (1763-1808), a founder of the Medical and Chirurgical Faculty of Maryland, was of Scotch descent, the son of Andrew and Susan Lawson Buchanan, and grandson of George Buchanan, the emigrant who laid out Baltimore town in 1730. He was born at “The Palace,” Baltimore County, Maryland, September 19, 1763, and studied under Dr. Charles Frederick Wisenthal, a famous Prussian surgeon of Baltimore, and under Dr. William Shippen of Philadelphia.

With the latter, he served in the Revolution. He received an M. B. at the University of Pennsylvania in 1785 and then spent about three years in Europe, chiefly in medical study at Edinburgh University. While there he held the office of president of the “Royal Physical Society.”

Returning to America, he received from Pennsylvania University his M.D. in 1789, his thesis being “Dissertato Physiologica de causis Respirationis ejusdemque Affectibus.” He began practice in Baltimore the same year. With Dr. Andrew Wisenthal, he also attempted to found a medical school, and lectured during the winter of 1789-1790 to a class of nine students on “diseases of women and children and the Brunonian system.” In connection with this enterprise, he published a treatise on “Typhus Fever,” the proceeds of which he desired to go towards the founding of a lying-in hospital.

Unfortunately, dissensions, the nature of which are not now evident, arose and, notwithstanding the efforts of Dr. Buchanan, the society was dissolved, and the school abandoned. In 1790 he issued a letter to the inhabitants of Baltimore in which he urged the registration of deaths, the creation of a public park, and the establishment of a humane society. 

In a July 4th oration in 1791, he discoursed on “The Moral and Political Evils of Slavery.” He retired from practice on account of bad health in 1800 and in 1806 removed to Philadelphia. There he became resident physician to the Lazarettos, in which institution he died of yellow fever on July 9, 1808, in his forty-fifth year. In 1789 he had married Laetitia, daughter of Thomas McKean of Pennsylvania, a signer of the “Declaration of Independence.”

Source: Medical Annals of Maryland (1899)

 

Lyde Goodwin                             

Lyde Goodwin was born on February 4, 1725. His name first appears in the records of Baltimore in 1747. He was a Judge of the Orphans Court Baltimore 1783, and 1788 was a Surgeon to Baltimore Light Dragoons in Yorktown. He was the Surgeon to Baltimore Troop 1783, and assigned the chair of Surgery in the projected medical school in 1790. He died at Baltimore in 1801.

Source: Medical Annals of Maryland (1899)

There is another Dr. Lyde Goodwin who was born in 1754 and who also died in 1801. The surname is also spelled Goodwyn in some accounts.

Source: The Colonial Ancestors of Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald

 

Daniel Moores                            

Daniel Moores, a Founder, was born in Harford County, MD in 1745. He became a pupil of John Archer, MB. He received his MD from the University of Edinburgh in 1787 with a Thesis entitled “De Febre Remittente Marilandiæ” (The Remittant Fever in Maryland, which was most likely Yellow Fever). He served as President of the Royal Physical Society of Edinburgh.

When he returned to America, he practiced for a time in Harford County and then later in Baltimore City. Dr. Moores died in Baltimore in 1802 of yellow fever and is interred at Rock Spring Episcopal Cemetery near Bel Air, Harford County, Md.  

Source: Medical Annals of Maryland (1899)

In 1791, Dr. Moores inherited a piece of property (size unknown) from his father. Just two years later, he sold the land, dwelling house, mill on Bynum's Run and mill dam to Harry Dorsey Gough who lived on the property until 1867.

 

Arthur Pue                                   

Arthur Pue was born at Elkridge, Anne Arundel County (now Howard County) in August of 1776, son of Dr. Michael P. and Mary Dorsey Pue of Belmont, Anne Arundel County. He attended medical lectures at the University of Pennsylvania in 1794 and in Edinburgh 1796-97, but he did not receive a medical degree from Edinburgh. He married Rebecca Buchanan, and they had thirteen children, four of whom were physicians. The family moved to Baltimore in 1804. Arthur Pue was a man of influence and a physician of prominence. He died at Baltimore in 1847.

Source: Medical Annals of Maryland (1899)

 

Henry Stevenson                         

Henry Stevenson was born in Londonderry, Ireland, 1721. He was educated at Oxford, England. The exact year of his arrival in Baltimore is not known, but his brother John, also a physician, came to Baltimore in or about 1745. Whether Henry accompanied him, or came later, is not certain.

In 1756 he erected a stone mansion home, “Parnassus,” just north of the site of the present city jail; here he maintained, at his own expense, an inoculating hospital, from 1765-76, and again after the Revolution, 1786-1800. In 1796, the first inoculation against smallpox in the U.S. was performed by Dr. Stevenson in Baltimore. Dr. Stevenson returned to Baltimore in 1786 and continued to practice here until his death. Died at Baltimore, March 31, 1814.

Source: Medical Annals of Maryland (1899)

Upon the outbreak of the Revolution, he espoused the royal cause and left Baltimore on the Declaration of Independence. During that time, he was a Surgeon in the British Navy, 1776-86. Dr. Stevenson’s property was confiscated during the Revolution, but some, including his home, Parnassas, was later returned to him because of his important contributions to the community. Among those he inoculated was John Parke Custis, a relative of George Washington, who wrote him a letter of thanks.

     Source: Founders On-Line, National Archives

 

Henry Stevenson, also serving in the Maryland Loyalist Regiment, owned property in Baltimore and Harford Counties that was confiscated on April 20, 1781. His goods and chattel were valued at £105, and owned almost 400 acres of property. The Commissioners left the property, not inventoried, in the possession of William Smith until the Commissioners decided to sell the property. Henry Stevenson’s real and personal property sold for nearly 3,500 pounds in two separate auctions.