Gouverneur Emerson, traveler, agriculturist, and doctor, eldest of the seven children of Jonathan and Ann Beel Emerson, was born August 4, 1795 near Dover, Kent County, Delaware. His grandparents having been received into the membership of the Duck Creek Meeting of the Society of Friends, Emerson was brought up in their faith. Through his mother's ambition he began to study medicine when he was sixteen, under one of her cousins, Dr. James Sykes, a surgeon of some note in Dover and one time governor of the state of Delaware. Afterwards he attended medical lectures in Philadelphia. The University of Pennsylvania granted him his M. D. in March, 1816. In 1816, owing to poor health, he moved to and practiced near Montrose, Pennsylvania, but after two years accepted an appointment as surgeon on a merchant ship bound for China. His journal gives detailed account of his voyage and a dramatic account of being held up and robbed by Spanish pirates on the return voyage. When Dr. Emerson returned to America he settled in Philadelphia where a yellow-fever epidemic gave him an opportunity for usefulness which he used so well that he was appointed attending physician to the City Dispensary. The Board of Health being without authority to deal with smallpox as it did with other contagious diseases, Dr. Emerson turned his attention, when on the Board of Health, to necessary legislation concerning checking the disease. Statistics relative to smallpox are to be found in his article, "Medical and Vital Statistics," published in The American Journal of the Medical Sciences for November, 1827, 1831, and July, 1848. Dr. Emerson made some contributions to the improvement of the agriculture of his native place, editing the Farmer's Encyclopedia and Dictionary of Rural Affairs. His interest in agriculture increased until he was entirely occupied with its demands to the exclusion of medicine. He definitely gave up his large practice in 1857 and occupied himself with questions of political economy and social science for the remaining years of his life. He died suddenly on July 2, 1874.
