Los Angeles County

Biographies

 

 


 

 

 

 

 

WILLIAM HEISTER DUKEMAN, M. D.

 

 

            Dr. William Heister Dukeman was a leading representative of the medical profession in Los Angeles from 1888 until his death twenty-eight years later.  “He enjoyed a really national prestige in the field of surgery,” said a contemporary writer, “and he was one of the ablest men in his line to claim residence on the Pacific coast.”  He was born in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, June 2, 1855, a son of George and Rachel (Clayton) Dukeman.  His parents spent all their lives in Lancaster, where his father died when past ninety-seven years of age.  George Dukeman was a man of ample means and an influential citizen in southeastern Pennsylvania. 

            William H. Dukeman had most liberal advantages, though his independent nature led him to secure means to pursue his career without recourse to his father.  He was educated in the district schools of his native community, and at the age of sixteen began teaching in an adjacent district.  He attended an academy in preparation for college, also the University of Pennsylvania and in 1877 entered the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.  While there he determined upon the study of medicine and surgery, and his final two years of undergraduate work were spent in the University of New York Medical School.  He graduated in the spring of 1880 with the M. D. degree.  During successive years he frequently interrupted his practice to pursue postgraduate and special clinical courses and this habit persisted until later years.  Perhaps his first important contribution to medical literature came in 1881, soon after he began practice, when he contributed a short article to the Medical Record of New York, diagnosing and describing more accurately than any other surgeon the location of the bullet fired by the assassin into the body of President Garfield.  During his early years he had experience in practice at Elmira, New York, in New York City hospitals, at Olean, New York, and at Rochester for six months.  He did postgraduate clinical work in the Bellevue Hospital of New York and the College of Physicians and Surgeons.

            Dr. Dukeman located in Los Angeles early in 1888 and for many years his practice was limited to surgery.  He regularly contributed articles to the New York Medical Journal and Medical Record and the Journal of the American Medical Association, his writings exhibiting the great range of his experience, including articles on the prevention and cure of tuberculosis, treatment of solar pneumonia in the adult, resume of twelve hundred examinations for life insurance, stricture of urethra, surgical technique without the use of antiseptics, and medical reports of forty-one consecutive successful abdominal operations.  He was a member of the Los Angeles County, California State and American Medical Associations.

            Dr. Dukeman died suddenly October 22, 1916, while at the wheel of his car, as he and his wife were driving to Pasadena to call on some friends.  He is survived by a brother, Edgar B. Dukeman, a diamond merchant of Los Angeles.  Dr. Dukeman before his death built the fine home at 1116 South Lake Street where Mrs. Dukeman resides.  It was in Los Angeles that he married Agnes Ballantyne, a native of Chicago, who received her educational training in that city and in Los Angeles.  Her parents were early settlers of Chicago and came to Los Angeles a short time before they passed away.  Mrs. Dukeman was given the best of training under eminent teachers of voice and has become locally well known as a vocalist.  Dr. and Mrs. Dukeman had one daughter, Leona A., who graduated from the Marlborough School for Girls in Los Angeles, and studied music with Signor de Pasquale and who was making a trip through the east with her mother when she died of influenza on the 20th of January, 1920, at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York.

 

 

 

 

Transcribed by V. Gerald Iaquinta.

Source: California of the South Vol. V, by John Steven McGroarty, Pages 447-448, Clarke Publ., Chicago, Los Angeles, Indianapolis.  1933.


© 2012  V. Gerald Iaquinta.

 

 

 

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