Butte County
Biographies
JOHN WEST
WILSON, M. D.
JOHN WEST WILSON, M.D.--In no department of modern surgery and medicine, perhaps, has American science made greater advancement than in the study and treatment of the eye, ear, nose and throat. This most important field of research and practice has been ably represented, in Oroville, for some years past, by John West Wilson, generally acknowledged to be among the most progressive of scholarly medical practitioners on the Pacific Slope. His father was West Wilson, a native of Ayrshire, Scotland, who came from the land of Burns to the United States when a young man, and for a while settled in Connecticut, where he engaged in farming. He married Miss Barbara Kennedy, also a Scot; and in the fifties he came to Iowa and enrolled themselves among the early settlers of Tama County. The trip was made through Chicago, when that town was a comparatively small place, and the intrepid pioneer used to recall with amusement the almost impassable roads, made so by the mud-holes in the low flat bottoms.
West Wilson located land near Traer, and this land, through foresight, exceptional capability, and hard work, he brought under a high state of cultivation and improved with good buildings. There, fondly reverting in memory and fancy to the scenes of their youth, he and his wife spent the remainder of their days, Mr. Wilson farming and dealing in grain, and Mrs. Wilson busy with the proper bringing up, according to Scotch standards and American ideals, of their two sons and two daughters. Mrs. Wilson preceded her devoted husband to the promised land, and one of the daughters is also dead. Another daughter, Sarah, lives in Scotland. The other son, Dalton, is a manufacturer in Waterloo, Iowa.
The second eldest of these children, John West Wilson was born at Traer, Tama County, Iowa, September 4, 1866, and was brought up on his father’s farm, where, like most Iowa youth, he learned to drive teams and to care for stock, while he received his early education in a public grammar school. He also attended, and graduated from, the excellent high school at Traer. While still a lad he chose the medical profession; and in 1891, after a year’s study under a preceptor, he entered the University of Iowa, and in 1894 graduated with honors from the homeopathic medical department. In the meantime, as early as 1892, he had started the general practice of medicine under another preceptor at Grundy Center, the same state; and in 1893 and 1894 he practiced medicine in the adjoining county of Humboldt.
In 1895 Dr. Wilson came to California, and to Oroville, where he opened a first-class office; and here he has resided and practiced ever since, save for those periods when, to satisfy a characteristic ambition for greater endeavor and wider accomplishment, he has gone away for research and postgraduate study. In 1897, for example, he went back to the East and entered the Chicago Clinical School; and the next year he attended the Hahnemann Eye, Ear, Nose and Throat College. So, too, the end of the nineties was spent at the department of medicine at the University of Illinois, where he graduated in 1900 with the degree of M. D. Since then he has taken other eye, ear, nose and throat courses in Chicago, as well as other medical courses in colleges and clinics in the East, returning to Oroville, after each course, to resume his practice. Making a specialty of surgery in these difficult fields, Dr. Wilson has been highly favored with a large and appreciative patronage; and it is the consensus of opinion that in all he undertakes he is eminently successful.
Rather
fitting it was, that when Dr. Wilson married he should
take his bride from the social circles of the town in which he has risen to
such eminence; the favoring and favored lady being Miss Ida Gray, the popular
daughter of Judge John C. Gray, the jurist lately deceased. She is a native
daughter, and was always a local favorite. Dr. Wilson is independent in
politics. Fraternally, he is a member of the Masonic bodies in Oroville, of
Islam Temple, A. A. O. N. M. S., and of the California Consistory in San
Francisco, and is also a member of Chico Lodge, No. 423, B. P. O. Elks.
Transcribed by Vicky
Walker, 2/20/08.
Source: "History of
Butte County, Cal.," by George C. Mansfield, Pages 758-761, Historic Record Co, Los Angeles, CA, 1918.
© 2008 Vicky
Walker.
Golden Nugget Library's Butte County Biographies