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.
GOLDEN NUGGET'S LOS ANGELES
BIOGRAPHIES