Dr. Jonas Clark, pioneer physician
Among the memories of distinguished gentlemen he’d met during
his youth in Massachusetts, pioneer Gilroy physician, Dr. Jonas
Clark enjoyed relating the tale of his student days. Headed for
classes at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he
occasionally rode along on a horse-drawn streetcar with Henry
Wadsworth Longfellow. The venerable American poet recited his
celebrated work,
”
The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere,
”
to Clark while they were traveling to downtown Boston.
Dr. Jonas Clark, pioneer physician
Among the memories of distinguished gentlemen he’d met during his youth in Massachusetts, pioneer Gilroy physician, Dr. Jonas Clark enjoyed relating the tale of his student days. Headed for classes at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he occasionally rode along on a horse-drawn streetcar with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The venerable American poet recited his celebrated work, “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere,” to Clark while they were traveling to downtown Boston.
Dr. Clark also studied medicine at Harvard University, where one of his professors was Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. The youthful Clark served as a medical assistant in preparing dissection specimens for Holmes’s class demonstrations. Besides his 30-year career as a professor of anatomy and physiology, Holmes was an outstanding medical authority of the era. He was also a poet, essayist and novelist. The two men remained friends until Holmes died in 1894. His son, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. was a US Supreme Court Justice.
Dr. Jonas Clark was born in Waltham, Mass. in 1852. He was educated at the Waltham New Church School, a private academy, before entering MIT, where he received his bachelor’s degree. He graduated with a medical degree from Harvard in 1875 in ear, nose and throat medicine. At first he served as house surgeon at the Massachusetts Charitable Eye and Ear Infirmary in Boston. Although Dr. Clark originally intended to remain on the East Coast, he decided to move West due to health reasons. While still in Boston, he married Honoria Tierney and they moved to California. Their daughter, Marie, was born in 1877 at Knight’s Landing, and two years later, their son John arrived. In the beginning, Dr. Clark practiced in Woodland and then spent one year practicing in San Francisco. In 1892, the Clark family moved to Gilroy.
Dr. Clark’s office was located on North Monterey Street where he joined Dr. Thayer for five years before establishing his own practice. Gilroy during the era had no hospital, and major surgery cases had to be sent all the way to San Jose. Seeing the need, in 1898, Dr. Jonas Clark established Gilroy’s first emergency-care facility. The building, which he named the Gilroy Private Hospital, was located in the Rea Building at the corner of Fifth and Monterey streets. At first, he brought in trained surgical nurses from San Francisco. By 1904, demand for his services had grown to the point that he expanded the practice by renting a larger building on Railroad Street. Besides offering extended surgical services, the facility also handled maternity cases. In 1903, he began a training school for nurses, the only such facility between San Jose and Santa Barbara. His daughter Marie served as head nurse.
Honoria Clark died 1902 in a runaway horse and buggy accident. In 1909, Dr. Clark remarried, to Emily “Millie” Casey, the daughter of former Gilroy Mayor and Gilroy Brewery owner, Michael Casey. The couple had three sons, Thomas, George and William.
Dr. Clark practiced continuously in Gilroy, except the years 1910-13, when he was Superintendent of the Santa Clara County Hospital. He also was for a decade the district surgeon for the Southern Pacific Railroad and health officer for the City of Gilroy. He was the first person honored with life membership as a pioneer in surgery by the Santa Clara County Medical Society. Dr. Clark enjoyed many such honors during his lifetime, including being elected in 1914 as a Fellow in the American College of Physicians and Surgeons. He was a 52-year member of the California State Medical Society.
Over the years, Dr. Jonas Clark’s proudest achievement was as founder of Gilroy’s first private hospital, an institution which he, and later his son, Dr. John Clark, operated for 30 years. After the hospital closed in 1925, Gilroyans went to work to raise funds to build Wheeler Hospital, which opened in 1929.
By the eve of World War II, Dr. Jonas could also look with pride to a family which had produced three generations of doctors, when his granddaughter, Mary Honoria Clark, daughter of his son, Dr. John Clark, graduated from the University of California with a medical degree. For a time, she joined the family firm in Gilroy.
Dr. Clark was active in community affairs all his life. After his wife Millie died in 1930, his daughter Marie, by then a public school nurse, lived with him and cared for him in the family home at 192 Fifth St., which sat on the corner of Fifth and Church streets at the site of the present church parking lot. Dr. Jonas died at age 91 in December 1943.
Pride for his Massachusetts beginnings and his connections with such famous personages as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Oliver Wendell Holmes was still going strong in 1940. In August that year, he found among his things a copy of the original lyrics to “Home Sweet Home,” handwritten 88 years previously by its composer, John Howard Payne. The song dated to 1852, the year Dr. Clark was born. According a Gilroy Dispatch interview with Dr. Clark, the version in his possession had a somewhat changed set of lyrics, altered from the first version, written in 1823.
The original lyrics were set down while the composer, John Howard Payne, was staying in Paris. The copy found by Dr. Clark in his Gilroy home that day in 1940 had been sent by Payne to his mother, Mrs. Rachel Clark, in Waltham, Mass., because the two families had been close friends.
