John Ridlon / [H. Winnett Orr].

  • Orr, H. Winnett (Hiram Winnett), 1877-1956.
Date:
[1936]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: John Ridlon / [H. Winnett Orr]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    Reprint from SURGERY, GYNECOLOGY AND OBSTETRICS July, 1936, Vol. 63, 120-123 JOHN RIDLON H. WINNETT ORR, M.D., F.A.C.S., Lincoln, Nebraska J OHN RIDLON was born in the township of Clarendon, Rutland County, Vermont, on November 24, 1852. He was one of three boys, but the two others died in infancy. His father, Noel Potter Ridlon, was a farmer who became a dairyman just before the Civil War. His mother was Nancy Bromley Hulett Ridlon, of Pawlet, one of thirteen children. Dr. Ridlon always spoke highly of his Grandmother Ridlon whose husband died at the early age of fifty-five, and who with forty acres of land and about eight hundred dollars in money at interest, raised eight children and five grandchildren. When John was fourteen his father was killed in a railway accident while driving home from Rutland. The next year he and his mother left the farm for Poultney, Vermont, where he attended a commercial college. Not long after¬ ward they went to Marengo, Illinois, making the trip over the New York Central and Michigan Central railroads before the days of sleepers, diners, or even wash basins on the train. At this time there came an opportunity to sell the Vermont farm which was supposed to contain marble, and John and his mother were left in comfortable possession of about fifteen thousand dollars. During the next few years Ridlon worked at various times as book salesman, grocery clerk, and helper to a civil engineering corps. His mother remarried. After contracting malaria and losing eighteen pounds in weight, John returned to Vermont to attend the Vermont Central Institute and later Tufts College. Through a miscarriage of college justice, he was expelled from Tufts at the end of his sophomore year and so went to the University of Chicago, graduating in 1875. An early indication of intellectual independence was his class oration on “The Infallibility of the Pope”; its departure from orthodoxy creating a stir in that Baptist institution. At his various colleges, Ridlon played baseball, taught boxing and fencing, organized a debating club, started a library, and pulled No. 5 on the crew. He also played bass viol in the orchestra and became a member of Theta Delta Chi, Delta Kappa Epsilon, and other college societies. In 1899 he was recalled to Tufts to receive an Honorary M.A. degree, and again in 1926 to be awarded the degree of Sc.B. In 1875 Ridlon entered the College of Physicians and Surgeons in New \ork with Prof. E. G. Seguin as his preceptor. When he graduated, March 1, 1878, he