twenty-second year of his age. A tradition in his family states that the cause of his death, as well as that of his sisters, was tuberculosis. The graves of all the family are in the old St. John's Episcopal Church burying-ground in Hagerstown.
Dr. Samuel Young lived to be 108 years old, but misfortune seemed to follow him. In 1805, a year after his son's death, he took into partnership, at the recommendation of Dr. Benjamin Smith Barton (John R. Young's friend, as well as his teacher) a classmate of his son's—Dr. Thomas Walmsley, of Pennsylvania (at that time practising at Chambersburg), and on August 15, 1806, this young man died. The suggestion seems not amiss that he died of tuberculosis contracted at the Young home. Dr. Samuel Young was at this time 76 years old, a man of property in real estate and in slaves, whom he liberated at his death.
There is an exquisite miniature of John Young, painted by Peale, and an indifferent life-size bust of Samuel Young, painted by Frymier, both in the possession of Miss Bessie Bell Patterson (whose mother was a second cousin of John R. Young's) at her home near McConnellsburg, Pennsylvania.
Zakrzewska, Marie Elisabeth (1829–1902)
Berlin, Prussia, was the birthplace of Marie Zakrzewska, a pioneer woman physician Her father, an officer in the Prussian Army, was a descendant of a Polish family of high rank which shared their country's downfall. Her mother traced descent from a gipsy queen of the tribe of Lombardi. The great-grandmother went through the Seven Years' War as assistant-surgeon to her father, an army-surgeon; her daughter was a veterinary surgeon and Marie's mother studied and followed the profession of midwife when her husband was dismissed from the army on account of his revolutionary tendencies.
Marie was the eldest of a family of five sisters and one brother. When eleven years old she was taken by a doctor to the dead house of a hospital to see the corpse of a young man whose body had turned green from poison; she was left to roam at will in the dissecting rooms and later was forgotten and locked alone in the dead house until late at night.
She was, also, about this time given two books to read, "The History of Surgery" and "History of Midwifery," and her school days ended when she was thirteen.
The mother's practice was by this time large and increasing and Marie assisted her where-ever possible. Marie, when twenty was admitted to the Berlin School of Midwifery, but only after a direct appeal to the King by Dr. Schmidt, a prominent physician of the school, himself in failing health. It was planned that Marie should eventually be chief accoucheur in the Hospital Charité and professor of midwifery when he resigned. Marie met with untold opposition, which was only overcome through Dr. Schmidt's tenacity of purpose and the desire of his colleagues to fulfill his dying wishes.
The appointment was granted on May 15, 1852, but insidious enmity accomplished its purpose and in November of the same year she relinquished her position.
The first report of the Pennsylvania Female College had been sent to Dr. Schmidt, and Marie planned to emigrate, a project not executed until March, 1853. The parting from a home to which she was never to return, was, she writes, the hardest moment of her life. A sister accompanied her and after a voyage of forty-seven days the two girls reached New York with the sum of one hundred dollars between them. It was a blow to learn from Dr. Reisig, a friend, that in America, women physicians were of the lowest rank, and Marie's limitations in the English language prevented her from getting in touch with members of the medical profession. Nevertheless, after securing suitable rooms she put out her sign but practice did not come. Then she turned heroically for a time from her chosen work and started in the trade of supplying embroidered work to the wholesale houses. She was soon able to give work to as many as thirty girls and thus earned sufficient to keep in comparative comfort a family of four, for in September a second sister and a friend joined them. From her workgirls she gained a lasting impression of the almost hopeless struggle they waged against a life of shame. The wolf being now a reasonable distance from the door, Marie turned again to her cherished project, and obtained an interview with Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell (q.v.),
