Topic: Medicine
Medicine, doctors, hospitals, pharmaceuticals
Dr. Charles Wilinsky, a Polish immigrant who cared for West Enders at his private medical practice, founded the neighborhood’s first dedicated health center to centralize disparate healthcare services and educate West Enders in preventative healthcare practices.
At New York’s 1939-40 World’s Fair, a young man from the West End presented the Chemical Man, a working model of the human digestive system.
Dr. Joseph Stevens (J.S.) Jones, who lived most of his life in the West End, was a successful actor, playwright, theater manager, and physician in the nineteenth century. Jones graduated from Harvard Medical School and wrote between 150 and 200 plays in his lifetime. In 1924, the City of Boston tore down Dr. Jones’s home on Bowdoin Street, and other historic West End sites, in order to widen Court and Cambridge Streets.
Boston stockbroker Thomas W. Lawson owned a racehorse, Boralma, who won $5000 in Kentucky’s Transylvania Stakes in 1900. The earnings were donated to the West End Nursery and Infants’ Hospital, with an amusing letter exchange between “Boralma” and “The Babies.”
Dr. Thomas Jenks, one of Boston’s leading figures in medicine, business, and politics during the late-eighteenth century, lived in the West End for most of his life. In 1893, when Jenks chaired the Board of Public Institutions, his refusal to accept a donation of rocking chairs to the Rainsford Island hospital put him at odds with Alice Lincoln, an advocate for the poor in Boston, and Martin Lomasney, the political boss of the West End.
Massachusetts General Hospital was built in the early nineteenth century on four acres of land in the old West End called Prince’s Pasture. Many doctors and prominent citizens of Boston can be counted among its founders.
Elizabeth Mott and her husband, Dr. Richard Dixon Mott, were nineteenth-century British immigrants who established a botanical medicine practice at the Otis House, located in today’s West End.
Dr. Tony Minichiello was a dentist who turned a love of jazz into a specialty – operating on jazz musicians.
