Jerome V. C. Smith


Jerome Van Crowninsfield Smith was an American physician, author and politician, serving as the fourteenth mayor of Boston, Massachusetts from 1854 to 1855.

Biography

After attending public school in his home town of Conway, New Hampshire, Smith earned a medical degree from Brown University in 1818 and graduated from the medical department of Williams College in 1822. In the following year, he took a position in Pittsfield, Massachusetts as lecturer in anatomy at the newly established Berkshire Medical Institution. In that same year, he became the founding editor of the Boston Medical Intelligencer. After the publication was renamed to the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal in 1828, he continued as editor through 1856. Smith then established his own publication, The Medical World, which he edited from 1856 to 1857. He also edited the short-lived Bowen's Boston News-Letter and City Record.
In civic affairs, Smith served as quarantine physician for the port of Boston, and then ran for mayor of the city in five successive years before being elected in November 1853. In each of these contests he was opposed by establishment Whig candidates, while he ran as the nominee of various dissident parties, including Native American, People's Party and Citizen's Union. He was reelection in 1854. Although nominated for mayor in 1858 by both the People's Union and National American parties, he declined to run.
In 1855, during his second term as mayor, Dr. Smith was awarded an honorary degree from Dartmouth College.
Smith served on numerous corporate boards, including those of several banks and railroads. He toured Europe and the Near East in 1850-51 and while abroad served as a juror for the American Industrial Exhibition at the London World's Fair.
In 1863,he removed to New York City, where he assumed the post of Professor of Anatomy at the New York Medical College and Charity Hospital.
During the Civil War, he volunteered to serve with the United States Christian Commission and was stationed with Union forces in New Orleans between October 1863 and August 1865. He was commissioned as lieutenant colonel, 83rd Regiment, U.S. Colored Infantry and was appointed by General Nathaniel P. Banks to head a commission overseeing sanitation in the city.
Dr. Smith married Eliza Maria Brown of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, on December 29, 1825.
He continued to lecture and write through his remaining years. He died on August 20, 1879, at the home of his sister-in-law in Richmond, Massachusetts. The cause was "a complication of diseases, dropsy and asthma." He is buried with his wife in the Pittsfield Cemetery.

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