Page:Woman of the Century.djvu/134

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BROWN.
BROWN.
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adjusted their issue by providing for regular lodges of colored people, and Mrs. Brown marched at the head of the English delegation on entering the hall for the re-union of the bodies of Good Templars, in 1886, in Saratoga, N. Y. In 1877, after repeated personal efforts with leading Republican officials, State and National, had failed to secure any actual, or even fairly promised political, antagonisms of the liquor interests, Mrs. Brown went to New York City and assumed the management of the newly organized National Prohibition Alliance. She had also a secondary aim, which was to make that organization a barrier and corrective against the growing defection of temperance workers from radical measures of reform. Hence she gave herself for five years to the projection of prohibition reform by means of the National Prohibition Alliance, which she caused to be operated chiefly in the churches and independent of party policy. Through those years she maintained an office in New York City without salary, while her husband continued in the ministry and, with their family of five children, remained at his work in Pittsburgh, Pa. In the winter of 1881-82, from a caucus of Republicans, directed by Simon Cameron, she received the tender of the highly remunerative position of Superintendent of Public Instruction in the State of Pennsylvania. To have accepted that offer, she would have been compelled to abandon her work with the Prohibition Alliance, without any one to take her place; hence she did not accept In October, 1881, Mrs. Brown gathered through personal letters special circulars and press notices a large National Conference of leading Prohibitionists and reformers in the Central Methodist Episcopal Church, New York City. Before that Conference she made one of her most impassioned appeals for unity among temperance workers, whereby the National Prohibition Alliance was led to unite formally with the Prohibition Reform Party. The success of the New York conference led to a similar conference in Chicago the following year, August, 1882, which was arranged for by Mrs. Brown, and which was more successful than the one held in New York. Many of the old leaders of the Prohibition Reform Party were induced to attend the Chicago conference. At that conference Miss Frances E. Willard and her immediate following of Home Protectionists and the Woman's Christian Temperance Union were brought into the Prohibition Party, besides many local organizations of temperance workers. Mrs. Brown thereupon dropped the non-partisan National Prohibition Alliance, believing that it had served its purpose. In the summer of 1882 Dr.and Mrs. Brown were elected to the presidency and vice-presidency of the Cincinnati Wesleyan College. The entire management of the institution has since devolved upon them, Mrs. Dr. McClellan Brown holding a professorship as well as the vice-presidency of the college. During that time she has twice visited Europe and has been warmly received among reformers and scholars abroad. Her sixth child, a son, was born in January, 1886. She has lost nothing of the grace and power which marked her early platform work. Among others she has received the degrees of Ph. D. and LL. D.


BROWN, Miss M. Belle, physician and surgeon, born in Troy, Ohio, 1st .March, 1850. She was educated in the high school of her native town, and in the Oxford Female College, Oxford, Ohio. Her father was born in Rhode Island and went west in 1828. The genealogy of that branch of the Brown family of which she is a member is notable. Chad Brown emigrated from England in the ship "Martin," which arrived in Boston, .Mass , in July, 183S. He went to Providence, R.I., in the year of his arrival. He was one of a committee of four to prepare the first written form of government adopted and continued in force until 1644, when Roger Williams returned from M. BELLE BROWN. England with the charter and Chad Brown was the first one of the thirty-nine who signed that charter. In 1642 he was ordained the first settled pastor of the Baptist Church. His great grandsons. John and James, repurchased a part of the land that had originally belonged to him and presented it to the college of Rhode Island. In 1770 the corner-stone of University Hall was laid by John Brown. In 1804 the name of that institution was changed to Brown University. Dr. Brown's mother's name was Telford, and her ancestors were of the Jennings family from England. From her mother, who was the neighborhood doctor in an emergency and kept salves and liniments for everybody who desired them, she inherited her taste for medicine. Doctor Brown commenced the study of medicine in 1874. In 1876 she went to New York and entered the New York Medical College and Hospital for Women. She was graduated in 1879 and entered immediately upon a general practice in West 34th street. New York, where she still resides. She is one of the few women in medicine who practice surgery. She makes a specialty of diseases of women and is professor of diseases of women in the New York Medical College and Hospital for Women, and is also secretary of the faculty of that institution. She is a member of the American Institute of Homeopathy, of the New York County Medical Society, a member of the consulting staff of the Memorial Hospital in Brooklyn, and of the New York Homeopathic Sanitarium Association.


BROWN, Olympia, Universalist minister, born in Prairie Ronde. Kalamazoo county, Mich., 5th January, 1835. Though a Wolverine, and always claiming to be a representative Western