Alice Mary (Smith) Patterson D.O. (1862 - 1928)

Born 5 Dec 1862 in Kirksville, Adair, Missouri, United States

Ancestors

Wife of Henry Eldorus Patterson D.O. — married 31 Dec 1884 in Kirksville, Adair, Missouri, United States

Wife of George Henry Shibley — married 31 Jan 1906 in Washington, District of Columbia, United States

Descendants

Died 3 Mar 1928 at age 65 in Fort Sill, Comanche, Oklahoma, United States

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Biography

Alice Mary Smith was a the daughter of William F. Smith and Sarah (Link) Smith, born on 5 December 1862 in Kirksville, Missouri.^[1][2]

She married Henry Eldorus Patterson, who had been a childhood friend. ^[1]

Alice (Smith) Patterson and her husband Henry Patterson both enrolled in the second class of the American School of Osteopathy in 1893. They graduated in 1895. ^[1]

Henry died in 1903. In 1908, Alice married her second husband, George H. Shibley, who was also an osteopathic physician, as well as a sociologist and writer. After this marriage, she continued to use the name Patterson. ^[1]

She passed away from heart failure in 1928 at the home of her daughter in Fort Sill, Oklahoma.^[1]

Research Notes

There is a LOT of cut and paste with no sourcing, need to find out what is in the public domain, and credit the writer. Everything between the lines of dashes is copied from something also copied at Find A Grave, unsourced, and likely a second place. Very frustrating.

Original Information

This was merely copied here from Find A Grave.^[3] The author was also not credited at Find A Grave. If this lady and people of her time saw how entitled we feel to other people's creations, I doubt she would agree this is a good idea. This is about Alice as a doctor, she was not only that.

She was a remarkably talented and beautiful woman who, with her husband Henry Patterson graduated in the second class at the School of Osteopathy, newly founded in Kirksville, Missouri by Dr. Andrew Taylor Still, discoverer of Osteopathic Medicine. They both became staff members of the school and infirmary, Alice lecturing in anatomy, obstetrics and gynecology. She was also first assistant in maternity at the infirmary. She discovered a cure by osteopathy for gall bladder blockage, and one of her early patients was a six year old boy whose potentially fatal heart irregularity had been unsuccessfully treated elsewhere. Alice corrected the function and the patient lived for thirty three more years. In time over thirty-five of Alice's relatives became osteopathic physicians. After several years of stress in helping to operate the school and hospital, she and her husband, whose health was deteriorating, decided to start a practice and established themselves in summers at Mackinac Island, Michigan, and winters in St. Augustine, Florida. The father of Alice's six year old patient, Ohio Senator Joseph B. Foraker, was so grateful for her work that he persuaded Alice and Henry to set up a practice in Washington, D.C., promising his name as their reference. The couple followed his suggestion, and their practice quickly grew as the first one in the nation's capital. Alice maintained their successful practice after Henry's early death and until her own twenty-six years later.

From a profile of Alice in an osteopathic journal: "Dr. Shibley [her second husband's surname] disappoints the old ideas of how a woman physician should look by being a really beautiful woman, of the Southern type, with delicate features that still indicate her strength, and dark brown hair which she dresses with the beautiful simplicity that greatly becomes her, and in the midst of a successful professional career she has remained the mother also, carefully rearing a daughter who is talented in musical and literary lines.....her patients and those who know her best love her best, for her sanity and good nature, her spontaneity and beauty, her quiet voice, as well as her skill." And in her memorial program: "Rarest charm...grace...physical poise...she needn't have had a back to her chair for she never used it....radiant eyes--speaking eyes, perfect brow and nose...expressive and sensitive hands."

Alice was a classmate at Missouri State Normal School, Kirksville, of Gen John J. Pershing. He was also a student of William Smith at the University of Nebraska, a relative of Alice's son-in-law, Paul R. Smith. Her address book: Recorder of Deeds, Jacksonville, OR, 480 acres timber land 25 Jun 1908 $9,290 deeded from George H. Shibley to Alice and recorded 8 Aug 1910 in repayment of a loan. Alice and Henry's papers, a three volume biography, "Alice - A Remembrance" and another, "Alice's Travels," both compiled by her grandson Quentin Cabell Smith, are in the Museum of Osteopathy in Kirksville.

Sources

1. ↑ ^{1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4} "Osteopathy Owes Much to the Families Who Settled Kirksville," Now & Then (newsletter of the Museum of Osteopathic Medicine), A.T. Still University, Kirksville, Missouri, Summer 2013, pages 1-3.
2. ↑ Find a Grave, database and images (https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/144926333/alice-mary-patterson_shibley: accessed 29 April 2023), memorial page for Dr Alice Mary Smith Patterson Shibley (5 Dec 1862–27 Mar 1928), Find a Grave Memorial ID 144926333, citing Rock Creek Cemetery, Washington, District of Columbia, District of Columbia, USA; Maintained by Victor E. Everhart, PhD (contributor 47774451).
3. ↑ Find a Grave, database and images (https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/144926333/alice-mary_patterson-shibley: accessed 31 October 2022), memorial page for Dr Alice Mary Patterson Smith Shibley (5 Dec 1862–27 Mar 1928), Find a Grave Memorial ID 144926333, citing Rock Creek Cemetery, Washington, District of Columbia, District of Columbia, USA; Maintained by Victor E. Everhart, PhD (contributor 47774451) . (The unsourced text seems to have been taken from here, or both came from ...?)

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Quentin Smith for starting this profile.