Dr. Gershom H. Hill

HILL, HYDE, PARKER, REYOLDS, FORD

Posted By: C. Diamond IAGenWeb volunteer
Date: 1/3/2011 at 00:12:35

Biographical Souvenir of the counties of Delaware and Buchanan.
Chicago: F. A. Battey & Company. 1890.
Page 606.

DR. GERSHOM H. HILL was born in Garnavillo, Clayton county, Iowa, on the eighth of May, 1846. His grandfather, Mark Langdon Hill, was once a United States senator; his father, James J. Hill, a graduate of Bowdoin College and of Andover Theological Seminary, a home missionary and a member of the “Iowa Band.” His mother was a daughter of Deacon Gershom Hyde. These ancestors were all natives of Maine and on both sides of English descent. During boyhood the doctor lived in the towns of Albany and Savanna, Ill., Glencoe, Minn., and Wapello, Iowa. He is a graduate of Iowa college, in Grinnell, and of Rush Medical college, in Chicago. He read medicine with Dr. C. C. Parker, of Fayette, Iowa, and after finishing his preparation to practice, located at Moline, Ill. After spending nine months of professional life in Moline, he came to Independence, Iowa, on the fourth of December, 1874, to take the position of first assistant physician in the hospital for the insane. Upon the resignation of Dr. Reynolds, he was promoted to superintendent on the first of November, 1881. He still continues to hold this position.

The last three months of the year 1878 were spent in post-graduate studies in New York city. On the ninth of January, 1879, he was married to Miss Louisa B. Ford, a school marm in Lynn, Mass. Dr. and Mrs. Hill were formerly Congregationalists, but in Independence are connected with the First Presbyterian church, of which he is now an elder. They have one child, a daughter, four years old.

The doctor lost his mother when he was six years old; his father died in 1870. These parents are buried in Grinnell. He has one own brother, who is a clergyman in Medford, Mass., also two half-brothers and four half-sisters by his stepmother, who resides in Des Moines. The doctor is a trustee of his alma mater at Grinnell, and a lecturer in the medical department in the State University. He is a member of the following professional organizations--The American Medical Association, the Association of Superintendents of American Institutions for the Insane, the American Academy of Medicine, the Iowa State Medical Society, the Austin Flint Medical Association, the Cedar Yalley Medical Association, the Fayette County Medical Society and the Buchanan County Medical Society. He has been honored with the presidency of the last named society for more than ten years.