Repository: UIHistories Project: Book - History of University of Illinois at Chicago (1921) [PAGE 4]

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HISTORICAL SKETCHES

I - T H E COLLEGE OF MEDICINE

By Dr. D. A. K. Steele, Dr. Charles Davison and Dr. A. C. Eycleshymer THE GENESIS OF A GREAT MEDICAL COLLEGE

BY

D. A. K.

STEELE,

M.D., L.L.D.

The names of the founders of this institution are chiseled upon the cornerstone of Mic old College of Physicians and Surgeons, at the northwest corner of Honore and I larrison Streets, now known as the College of Dentistry of the University of Illinois. A.. Reeves Jackson, Charles Warrington Earle, Leonard St. John, Samuel A. McWilliams, and the writer's are the names chiseled on the face of this cornerstone, commemorating the memories of five men to whom the College owes its inception, name, ideals, arid development. For ten years they were in supreme command of its policy, faculty, and curriculum, and directed its course with ability, sagacity, and success. .They were men in the prime of life, honored in this profession, and all had experience in medical teaching in other colleges. They possessed the individual requirements of a medical teacher: knowledge, experience, aspiration, enthusiasm, honesty, and conHcience—the foundation stones of character. Jackson, Earle, McWilliams and St. John have passed on. This Medical College in a monument to their lives, to the lives of others who labored with them and who also have gone before their Maker, to still others who are laboring and struggling on and on to build up this great Medical Department of the State University; to uphold the honor and dignity of the medical profession, and to carry out the ideals of its founders and supporters. Jackson was born in Philadelphia June 17, 1827, and died in Chicago, November 12, 1892, at the age of 65. Earle was born April 2, 1845, in Westport, Vermont, a small village in Christenden County, near Burlington. He died November 19, 1893, at the age of 48. McWilliams was born February 7, 1836, in a little village of north Ireland by the name of Newtonards, County Down, near Belfast. He died February 15, 1917, aged 81 years. St. John was born in a Canadian hamlet in 1853, and died April 2, 1920, at the age of 67. It is the young doctor with push, energy and enthusiasm who makes medical history. He compels the world to honor him for his real worth, and to accept him for what he really is—oftimes a real hero. There are certain elements of character essential to professional success. The well educated mind looks beyond the mere semblance of things into the higher realm of nature's laws and forces, and I cannot help but think that our early environments have much to do with our future success. A study in early life of nature and nature's laws purifies and ennobles our whole subsequent career. To him who has been fortunate enough to open his eyes for the first time on the light breaking over the Green Mountains of Vermont or the rugged grandeur of the Colorado Peaks, or near the roaring of a mighty ocean or the rushing, whirling waters of a turbid river, there must remain ever an ineffaceable memory picture of nature's wonders; and as his budding brain realizes and appreciates the beauties of the landHcape, the ever changing and yet harmonious colors of Nature's painting—whether in field or forest, in garden or on hillside, in the morning dawn or when lit by the glows of an autumn sunset— his mind cannot fail to be impressed with the grandeur and eloquence of nature's sermons, nor can he help realizing that a higher and mightier power than man rules the universe and directs by an all-wise method the mysteries of life. It is always interesting to trace the origin of institutions of learning, and to investigate the underlying causes that brought them into existence; to study the characteristics of the men whose foresight and vision moved them to found a new medical vii