Sacramento County
Biographies
GEORGE PYBURN, M. D.
GEORGE PYBURN, M. D., Eleventh and H streets, Sacramento,
has been a practicing physician here since 1878, at which time he first came to
California from the State of Colorado, where he had been located for some
time. He was born in Newcastle-on-Tyne, England,
March 31, 1831. His father died while he was still young, and he had to
“go to work” early, in order to earn at least part of his living. At the
age of fourteen he entered the office of John and Benjamin Green, architects
and civil enginieers, and at eighteen was “articled,”
or apprenticed, to them for three years to learn the “art and mysteries” of
that profession. After the completion of his seven years of actual
apprenticeship, he worked for other firms as clerk and draughtsman, ultimately
going to Reading, in the south of England.
Being desirous, however, of studying medicine, he came, in 1854, to Toronto,
Canada, where he had the opportunity of a favorable situation, in which he could earn something whereby to defray his expense while
studying. The situation was that of assistant in the office of Cumberland
& Storm, architects and designers of the beautiful Toronto
University, in Queen’s Park.
Saving up meanwhile sufficient means to pay his fees, etc., he went to the
Western College of Homeopathy at Cleveland, Ohio,
where he graduated in 1859. Previous to this, however, he had practiced
some in Port Hope, Canada, where, to quote the words of an ably written notice
in a record of prominent homeopathic physicians, he had the honor, if not the
profit, of introducing homeopathy, in 1857-’58. After receiving the
degree of M. D. at Cleveland, he traveled—or as he prefers
to say, “roamed”—through the United
States, sojourning in various cities for
periods of various length. Besides others, he was in Indianapolis,
Cincinnati, Louisville, Nashville,
New York and Washington,
engaged perhaps quite as much in literary labor as in the practice of
medicine. While in Cincinnati,
besides contributing to the daily press, he became associate editor of the Scientific
Artisan, a weekly journal published by the American Patent Company and
occupying a similar position in the West to that of the Scientific American
in the East. In 1864 he settled in Indiana, first at Shellbyville and later at Logansport,
where he remained for over six years and built up a large practice,
establishing a reputation for ability and success. He then became
interested in the Union Colony, founded by the late Father Meeker; and in 1870
he went to Colorado. There,
besides endeavoring to lay a practical foundation for a treatise supplementary
to Horace Greeley’s “What I Know About Farming,” by raising potatoes for the Doryphora decemlineata
and other “truck” for the Calopenus spretus and two per cent a month for the gold-bugs, he
laid out irrigation ditches, hunted “Government corners” and antelopes, felt
pulses, ordered pills and set bones, secundem
artem. Removing, in 1875, from Greeley
to Georgetown, a prosperous mining camp in the Rockies
at an altitude of over 8,000 feet, he devoted himself entirely to the practice
of his profession and the study of botany, that region being peculiarly rich in
its flora. From that point, in 1878, he came to Sacramento,
as already stated. From youth the Doctor has been a rigorous investigator
into the secrets of nature, and is known among his acquaintances as an
assiduous cultivator of science and a successful physician. While living
in Toronto he was made, when only
twenty-four years old, a member of the Canadian Institute, a body composed of
the leading scientific and literary minds of that country. In 1872 he was
elected a member of the Indiana Institute of Homeopathy; he is also a member of
the American Society of Microscopists. As a
writer, the Doctor is an author of merit, being a contributor to the Popular
Science Monthly and other journals, medical and scientific. His
article a short time since in the Popular Science Monthly, on “Home-made
Telescopes,” attracted great attention on account of its practical value.
He has also published a number of minor brochures on various medical and
scientific subjects, which have had wide circulation and marked popular effect,
notably his publications on homeopathy. As a botanist, he is an
indefatigable collector. As such, his labors at present are mainly
directed to the formation of an herbarium for the
California Museum Association of Sacramento, of which body he is one of the
founders and directors. Being also an enthusiastic mineralogist, he was
employed to prepare the Catalogue of the State mineral cabinet, now in the
lecture-room of the E. B.
Crocker Art Gallery,
and is one of the three trustees of that treasure. The Doctor also takes
much pleasure in microscopes, telescopes and other optical instruments.
Lastly, he is a theoretical musician, and, as he says, he “extracts much honey
from harmony, and mellifluous melodies incite medicating motions in the atoms
which go to make up his be(e)ing!”
In conclusion, it should be said that Dr. Pyburn is a
self-made man, in the typical and American sense of the term. He has made
his way and a name for himself against odds that would have discouraged most
men. As a physician he has had quite flattering success, and whenever he
has been he has always had as large a practice as he cared to attend to.
About a year after his arrival in Sacramento
he was appointed physician and superintendent of the county hospital, and held
that office until the wheel of politics and “other things” “let him out!”
For two years, from 1879 to 1881, he was also a member of the city board of
health, being secretary of that body during the latter year.
Transcribed
by Karen Pratt.
Davis, Hon. Win. J., An
Illustrated History of Sacramento County,
California. Pages 556-557. Lewis Publishing
Company. 1890.
© 2006 Karen Pratt.