All Bones Considered: Laurel Hill Stories

By Joe LexSociety & Culture Documentary Education History

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All Bones Considered: Laurel Hill Stories episodes

March 16, 2025 Charles Brockden Brown: America's First Major Novelist (cenotaph)
BBB:LHWS #042-1 Charles Brockden Brown...
...is regarded by scholars as the most important American novelist before James Fenimore Cooper. His best-known works include Wieland and Edgar Huntly, both of which display his characteristic interest in Gothic themes. His works heavily influenced both Mary Bysshe Shelley and Edgar Allen Poe.
5 min
March 15, 2025Five Generations of Browns at Laurel Hill
ABC:LHWS #042 Five Generations of the Brown family...
...are interred at Laurel Hill
Charles Brockden Brown was American’s first successful novelist. his influence on Edgar Allen Poe was immeasurable. He has a cenotaph in the South section of Laurel Hill East.
Charles' nephew Frederick Brown was a successful druggist because of his ginger root-based nostrums. He was also one of four co-founders of Laurel Hill Cemetery.
Frederick's son Henry Armitt Brown was considered the best orator of his generation and often compared to Henry Clay and Daniel Webster.
Henry's daughter Anna Robeson Brown Burr was a highly successful author with more than two dozen books to her name, both fiction and nonfiction.
Anna's daughter Dorothy Burr Thompson got her PhD from Bryn Mawr and was one of the best-known archeologists in the country. Pamela Burr, younger by 5 years, wrote a play which featured her Bryn Mawr classmate Katharine Hepburn.
Frederick and Henry are buried at Laurel Hill East, while Anna, Dorothy, and Pamela are at Laurel Hill West.
1 hr 10 min
March 06, 2025 Katherine Rotan Drinker and The Radium Girls (encore)
ABC:LHS #072-5 A slight reworking of ABC:LHS #041...
...about Cecil Kent Drinker MD now features his wife Katherine Rotan Drinker, MD, as they take on the investigation of "jaw rot" among young women who had worked as painters of luminescent watch dials.
18 min
March 05, 2025 Sarah Logan Wister Starr: The Iron Fist Who Saved the School
ABC:LHS #072-4 By 1921...
...Women's Medical College was on the verge of failure. The new president Sarah Logan Wister Starr was a master fundraiser who treated Women's Medical School and its hospital as her private philanthropic project. She did save the school, but she infuriated both faculty and student body when she fired the popular professor of obstetrics and gynecology Alice Weld Tallant.
22 min
March 04, 2025Charlotte Yhlen & Marie K. Formad: Strangers in a Strange Land
ABC:LHS #072-3 In the mid-19th century...
...women from around the world flocked to Philadelphia in order to become physicians.
Everyone has seen the Frederick Gutekunst photo of three medical students from India, Japan, and Syria.
Charlotte Yhlen came from Sweden and became the first Scandinavian-born woman physician but couldn't get work in her home country so returned to the United States.
Marie K. Formad was from Russia. She became one of the premiere gynecologic surgeons in the country.
22 min
March 03, 2025 William J. Mullen: The Prisoner's Friend and Female Medical College
ABC:LHS #072-2 William J. Mullen...
...was the first President of Female Medical College of Pennsylvania. He is remembered for his tireless philanthropic work among inmates at Moyamensing Prison and for his over-the-top grave marker in the south section of Laurel Hill East.
23 min
March 02, 2025 Founding the Female Medical College of Pennsylvania
ABC:LHS #072-1 With help of Quaker philanthropists...
...a medical school for women was chartered in 1850. Through the courage and strength of the founders and early graduates, it slowly grew into a respected medical school whose memory lives today through the Drexel University School of Medicine.
14 min
March 01, 2025Women's Medical College: Some Selected Stories
ABC:LHS #072 is a condensed history of the Women’s Medical College of Pennsylvania.
First, I will tell you about the founding of the Female Medical College of Pennsylvania in 1850.
Second, I will talk about William J. Mullen, the school’s first President and a major contributor. He is remembered today for his over-the-top grave marker at Laurel Hill East.
Third, I will discuss the notable photograph of three women doctors in their traditional attire, followed by a discussion about Swedish immigrant Charlotte Yhlen and Russian immigrant Marie Formad.
Fourth, I will tell you about the near-mortal wound suffered by Women’s Medical when their new president Sarah Logan Wister Starr butted heads with one of the top surgeons at the hospital, which led to the resignation of the entire surgical staff.
And for dessert, if you missed it, is a slightly modified version of a podcast I did on Dr. Cecil Kent Drinker a few years ago, but now with the emphasis on his wife WMC graduate Dr. Katherine Rotan Drinker.
1 hr 58 min
February 15, 2025 John W. Forney: Gadfly, Chameleon, Provocateur
BBB:LHWS #041 John W. Forney...
...was a publisher, a politician, a railroad agent, and the only person to serve as both Clerk of the US House and Secretary of the US Senate. Abraham Lincoln befriended the man, but political enemies called Forney "Lincoln's dog." Andrew Johnson drank to excess at Forney’s Stag party the night before he was sworn in as Vice President. A city in Texas is named for him.
29 min
February 05, 2025 Jack Jones: Pioneering TV Anchor
ABC:LHS #071-4 John Claver "Jack" Jones...
...was a Philadelphian through-and-through - West Catholic High School, La Salle University. He was befriended by TV announcer John Facenda who got him hired at a local TV station. Jack rose to be evening anchor but died far too young.
20 min

About All Bones Considered: Laurel Hill Stories

From the publisher's feed

Hundreds of brief biographies of permanent residents of Laurel Hill East in Philadelphia and Laurel Hill West in Bala Cywnyd, Pennsylvania. Often educational, always entertaining.