Davis will present an introduction to the historically important Wyeth family. Louis, as a young lawyer from Pennsylvania, in 1837 settled in and developed Guntersville, AL, married Euphemia Allan of Huntsville whose father was a Presbyterian pastor and a noted abolitionist. Their son, John Allan, was born in 1845 and attended LaGrange Military Academy until it was closed by the war in 1861. The boy attached himself to Morgan’s Raiders and saw action in several engagements in Tennessee until captured and imprisoned in 1863 in a POW camp near Indianapolis, almost dying there until saved by a kindly doctor. After the war, Wyeth studied medicine at the University of Louisville, but felt unprepared to practice, so enrolled at Bellevue Medical School in New York City. His mastery of anatomy and surgical techniques only impelled him to study more in the medical centers of Europe, returning to found in 1881 the New York Polyclinic Graduate School of Medicine and Hospital, the first in America to require four years of study and hands-on training, the model for all schools thereafter.
