My Genealogy Hound

E. L. SMITH, M. D. The town of Shelton, Buffalo county, has a population of nearly a thousand souls. It has a scope of country tributary to it which, in density of population, is hardly exceeded in central Nebraska, yet in all that community there are but two physicians. The citizens give two explanations for this. The first is the remarkable healthfulness of the locality, and the second is that, as experiment has demonstrated, none but first-class physicians are needed or can prosper there. Each of these reasons seems reasonably satisfactory, and we dismiss the inquiry with them.

One of the physicians of Shelton, a man of strictly first-class medical acquirements, is Dr. E. L. Smith, who located in Shelton, in May, 1884. He came direct from Chicago, where he obtained his medical education and where he was partly reared. He is a native of Cook county, Ill., having been born there November 24, 1847. He was reared at Palatine, that county, and in Chicago; selected medicine as a profession when a young man, and secured his training under Dr. S. P. Brown, of Elgin, Ill., and Dr. A. N. Shefner, of Palatine, reading with these gentlemen in all three years, and finishing at the Rush Medical College, of Chicago, taking in that institution, besides the regular curriculum, sixteen special courses. As these things constitute part of a physician’s public record, and especially as they show his qualifications for his profession, they are things that the public are entitled to know, and it can therefore be deemed no bad taste on the part of the writer to state them explicitly in this article. Dr. Smith first attended the free dispensary of Chicago for two summers. He then took a special course in otology and ophthalmotology (eye and ear), and afterwards these: Dental pathology, laryngology, dermatology, two courses in anatomy, one in gynecology, two in physical diagnoses and diseases of the chest, one under Prof. J. H. Etheridge in opynaiology; attended the clinical institute in the hospital, and subsequently also took a course in taxidermy. This training extended over a period of more than five years, and was abundantly interspersed with the usual hospital practice and actual bedside experience. Such a course of training not only represents valuable time and much money, but also a vast amount of hard study, patient effort and painstaking observation and experiment. But long, arduous and costly as it is, it is nevertheless necessary to the successful pursuit of the profession, and the one who has gone through with it goes to the discharge of his duties with a degree of preparation that is the surest guaranty of success. Dr. Smith is an enthusiast in his profession. He inherits the taste that brought him to it. He comes of a family where some branches of materia medica afforded a topic for daily discussion. His parents, grandparents and all his uncles and aunts read medicine as an accomplishment, but few of them, however, practicing it as a calling. He therefore received, with the hereditary bent for the profession, exceptionally good advantages in his earlier years, and these, supplemented by the training he has had, admirably fit him for all the varied and responsible duties of his calling. Dr. Smith has confined himself and his life entirely to the preparation for and the practice of his profession. His business has been such as falls to the lot of the general practitioner, and it could hardly be otherwise in a country practice. He attends, to all calls promptly responding with as much alacrity to the wants of the poor as of the rich. His services are at the command of the suffering. His first thought is to give help. For the benevolent impulse that prompts such conduct he is as largely indebted to heredity as for the taste and knowledge which suggest the means of relief. To do good, to alleviate the sufferings of humanity and prolong and sweeten the life with which it is blest, were the chief incentives that actuated his people in their zealous pursuit of medical knowledge. And it will be appropriate in this connection to make some more minute references to Dr. Smith’s ancestrial history than we have done.

The doctor is a cross between New England and Pennsylvania stock. He combines in some degree the qualities of both — the religiously zealous, liberty-loving, knowledge-seeking Puritan and the sturdy, plodding, frugal, home-loving and peace-making people of Quaker training. His father, Israel Smith, was born and reared in Maine, and took up the line of travel to the West when a young man, settling in Cook county, Ill., 1827, being one of the pioneers of that locality. He passed his young manhood and maturer years there helping subdue the wildness of nature and opening the country to settlement, and there also spent his declining age, dying in the home of his adoption in 1878, well advanced in life. He was a farmer, devotedly attached to his calling and measurably successful at it. Dr Smith’s mother bore the maiden name of Caroline Baker and she was born and reared to young womanhood in her native state, moving thence West with her parents and settling also in Cook county, Ill., in the vicinity of Chicago, but long before that place had attained anything like its present population or commercial importance. She is still living, having through her systematic habits and quiet peaceful life reached a good old age.

Dr. Smith is the third of a family of three children and is the only professional one of the family and the only one who has taken up his permanent residence in the West.

He married June 16, 1869, in his native place, Palatine, Cook county, Ill., his choice falling on a girl whom he had known from childhood. Miss Carrie Kitson, a lady eminently fitted to bear him the companionship he sought in this alliance.

As a citizen Dr. Smith is progressive, enterprising, and public spirited. He seeks no prominence, political or otherwise, but for all that goes to build up his town and community he can be counted on to lend a helping hand. He has a host of friends who on occasion give heed to his counsel and advice. Personally he is pleasant and agreeable, being large of mould and generous of heart, warm of his sympathies and hearty in manner. He would attract attention by his personal presence in an assembly of a hundred men, and could hold their attention by his conversation if he chose to do so, and his friends say that this attention, so attracted and so held, will change to admiration, and that to friendship, which will remain steadfastly to the end.