American Medical Biographies/Botsford, LeBaron
Botsford, Le Baron (1812–1888)
The Botsfords were an old family who emigrated from Leicestershire, England, to Newton, Connecticut, where they became both eminent and wealthy. Amos Botsford, the grandfather of Le Baron, graduated at Yale in 1763 and was a tutor at the college in 1768, when he espoused the royalist cause. At the conclusion of the War of Independence, he with five hundred other loyalists sailed from New York for Annapolis, Nova Scotia, and he finally settled in Westmoreland County, New Brunswick. His son William, the father of Le Baron, graduated at Yale and studied law, afterwards being made a judge of the supreme court.
Le Baron was born in Westmoreland County, New Brunswick, in 1812, and began studying medicine in Glasgow in 1831, graduating there in 1835. After practising four years in Woodstock, New Brunswick, he removed to St. John, where he remained until his death in 1888.
In 1854 a terrible epidemic of cholera broke out in St. John, in which fifteen hundred persons perished. During its prevalence Dr. Botsford stuck to his post, and was unremitting in his attentions to all classes; his strong physique enabled him to come through the ordeal unscathed. He was a man over six feet and had a fine, prepossessing face, and was a ready, pleasing and forcible speaker, and, as the writer well remembers, always held the attention of his hearers when he addressed them on a medical or other subject.
He was for a number of years surgeon to the Marine Hospital, as well as to the General Public Hospital and president of the Canadian Medical Association in 1877.
His wife was a Miss Main of Glasgow, with whom he became acquainted while a student there. She died in 1877, leaving no children.