San Francisco County
Biographies
JOHN MURRAY MATTHEWS, M.D.
JOHN MURRAY MATTHEWS, M.D., whose office is at the corner of Twenty-third and Chattanooga streets, San Francisco, has been a resident of California since 1872, and has been engaged in the practice of medicine since 1866. He was born in Aberdeen, Scotland, in 1844, and received his early education in the St. Paul Street Grammar School of that city. He commenced the study of medicine in 1859, under the preceptorship of his uncle, Dr. William Pirrie, F. R. C. S., Senior Surgeon of the Royal Infirmary, Aberdeen, and author of “Pirrie’s Principles and Practice of Surgery,” published in 1868, and was the standard work of that day, which went through three editions and was translated into most of the European languages. In 1861 Dr. Matthews entered the Marshall Medical College of Aberdeen, where he graduated in 1866, after a full course of five years, and received his degree as Doctor of Medicine and Surgery. The Doctor went at once to Australia as surgeon of the Melbourne Steamship Company, and in that city was engaged as surgeon of the Melbourne Hospital, where he remained about one year. He then went to Sydney, where he entered into private practice, and while there helped to extract a bullet which was fired into the Duke of Edinburg by Fanny O’Farrell. He returned to England with the Duke, as junior surgeon of the Galatea, and remained in the naval service until August, 1868, when he resigned and came to the United States. He practiced in New York until 1870, when he went to Chicago and entered into private practice, and remained until he came to California in 1872. During those years he visited various parts of the United States and Canada, delivering lectures on medical subjects. The Doctor entered into private practice in San Francisco, where he has since continued. For three years he held the position of Professor of the Principles and Practice of Surgery, Ophthamology and Otology at the Woman’s Medical College of San Francisco, from 1882 to 1884.
Dr. Matthews comes from a family of physicians, his grandfather having been a prominent physician, as well as a wealthy philanthropist, who established the Poor Man’s Hospital, afterward consolidated with the Royal Infirmary. As we have already mentioned, his uncle is a prominent surgeon. Furthermore, one may read between these lines of shipwreck off the coast of Africa, and of strange experience,--we might say with Othello: “Of moving accidents by flood and field; of hair-breadth ‘scapes and portance in my travel’s history.” However, the Doctor has retired from the general practice of medicine, and now devotes most of his time to cellular pathology and our tissue remedies that act as molecular cellular therapeutics.
Transcribed
5-11-06 Marilyn R. Pankey.
Source: "The Bay of San
Francisco," Vol. 2, Pages
412-413, Lewis Publishing
Co, 1892.
©
2006 Marilyn R. Pankey.