first president of the Blackwell Medical Society of Rochester, the first incorporated society of women physicians entirely for scientific purposes, and for several years was the honorary president of the Woman's Medical Society of the State of New York. Dr. Dolley was a member of the Rochester Academy of medicine, and in 1907 was made a life member of the Rochester Academy of Science, the only woman upon whom this honor has ever been conferred. She occasionally addressed medical societies, one paper on "The Value of the Paquelin Cautery," Transactions Monroe Medical Society, 1879, and her address as president to the Woman's Medical Society of New York State in The Woman's Medical Journal, April, 1908.
Dr. Dolley died in Rochester, December 27, 1909, after an illness of several weeks.
One of her two sons, Charles, became a doctor in the city of Mexico.
Rochester Union and Advertiser, December 27, 1909. Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, December 28, 1909. Minutes of the Board of Guardians of the Poor, Phila., April 28, 1851; May 12, 1851; June 14, 1852. Women in Medicine, in "Woman's Work in America." Mary Putnam Jacobi. Personal information.
Donaldson, Francis (1823-1891).
Francis Donaldson was born in Baltimore, July 23, 1823, the fifth and youngest son of John Johnston Donaldson, president of the Franklin Bank. He was educated at Dr. Prentiss' school near Baltimore, but his father was unable to give him the advantages of a college training. Just after becoming nineteen he studied under Prof. Samuel Chew (q. v.), and later spent a year or more as interne at the Baltimore Almshouse. Having graduated M.D. at the University of Maryland in 1846, he spent two years in Europe, and in the hospitals of Paris listened to the greatest teachers. He warmly embraced the new rational medicine, then displacing the old empiricism and blood-letting. On his return to Baltimore, in 1848, he was appointed resident physician to the Marine Hospital and after two years' service began to practise, the remainder of his busy life being devoted to this and teaching. From 1852 to 1855 he was attending physician to the Baltimore Almshouse, and from 1858 to 1863 professor of materia medica in the Maryland College of Pharmacy. In 1866 the chair of physiology was created for him in the University of Maryland, hygiene and general pathology being added to the title, with clinical instruction in diseases of the throat and chest. After a service of fourteen years he retired from the didactic part of his chair and in 1888 abandoned teaching altogether.
Dr. Donaldson was an expert in physical diagnosis, and most of his writings, which were very numerous, especially in the form of journal articles, related to the chest and throat. His most important production was a section, on "Disease of the Pleura," in "Pepper's System of Medicine," vol. iii, pp. 483-601; he is also the author of a fine memoir of Dr. Charles Frick, in Gross' "Lives of Eminent American Physicians of the Nineteenth Century," 1861.
Besides the positions named. Dr. Donaldson held many others of influence and honor, the most important being: President of the Medical and Chirurgical Faculty of Maryland, 1881-1882; president of the American Climatological Association; consulting physician to the Johns-Hopkins Hospital. He was also an associate fellow of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia.
He died in Baltimore, December 9, 1891, of "albuminuria and fatty heart."
He married Elizabeth Winchester, daughter of William Winchester, of Baltimore, who survived him with two sons and three daughters. His oldest son became a doctor.
Cordell's Annals of Maryland, 1903. Portrait.
Doolittle, Benjamin (1685-1749).
The only physician in Northfield, Massachusetts, previous to the beginning of the pastorate of Benjamin Doolittle in 1717, had been Patience Miller, wife of William Miller, tanner. She practised during the first two settlements, 1673 and 1685, and was said to be a skilful physician and surgeon. The mother of eight children, she died at an advanced age, March 16, 1716, leaving the town without medical aid. Mr. Doolittle came to Northfield to minister both to the spirit and the body, for the two professions were often united in one person in those days. Cotton Mather, speaking of this union in his "Magnalia" as an "Angelical Conjunction." In this case, although a preacher all his life, Doolittle was better known as a surgeon.
Coming from Wallingford, Connecticut, he preached his first sermon in Northfield in November, 1717. His grandfather, Abraham Doolittle, had settled in New Haven in 1640. Benjamin was the son of John and Grace Blaksley Doolittle of Wallingford, was born there July 10, 1695, and graduated at Yale College in 1716. During the year and a half following graduation he must have studied both theology and medicine, for he held himself competent as
