Francis H. Brown, MD (1835-1917)

Brown was an American surgeon, and founder and long serving manager of The Children’s Hospital in Boston, now known as Boston Children’s Hospital. Born in Boston to Francis and Caroline Matilde (Kuhn) Brown in 1835, he attended Boston Public Latin School and graduated from Harvard College in 1857, then Harvard Medical School in 1861. He practiced surgery privately in Cambridge for six years, and also worked for Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston Dispensary, St. Elizabeth’s Hospital and Boston City Hospital at various points in his life. He served as an Assistant Army Surgeon during the Civil War. In 1861 he married Louisa Beckford Eaton (1836-1865) of Salem, MA. They had one child, Louis Francis Brown.

Brown traveled in Europe extensively between 1867 and 1868, where he became interested in hospitals solely for the care of children, becoming invested in the idea of creating such a pediatric institution in the United States. Upon his return, he announced such plans and successfully campaigned for financial backing, publishing "A Statment Made by Four Physicians with fellow HMS graduates. In July 1869, The Children's Hospital was opened in a modest house in the South End of Boston. For a complete history of Boston Children's Hospital please see The Children's Hospital of Boston: “Built Better Than They Knew”(Boston: Little Brown and Co., 1983).

In 1871, Brown married a second time to Mary Sherwood Wood (1848-1917), the daughter of Charles Phillips Wood (1818-1878) and Mary Elizabeth (Sherwood) Wood (1819-1853). They had one child together, Edith Brown.

Brown authored many publications over his lifetime, mainly medical registers and military rolls and records of service local to Harvard College and Medical School, the greater Boston area, and New England at large.

Sherwood and Wood families

The Sherwoods and Woods were both wealthy families of Auburn, NY. Charles P Wood was a banker, who documented documented American abolitionist and activist Harriet Tubman's Civil War service and war assignments in the 1889 manuscript "A History Concerning the Pension Claim of Harriet Tubman."

John Milton Sherwood (1773-1871) and his father Isaac Sherwood (1769-1840) built the Old Line Mail, a system of stage coaches that carried passengers, freight and mail from Albany to Buffalo. The Sherwood family also owned and ran the Sherwood Inn in Skaneateles, founded in 1807.

A family tree and detailed geneological notes on the families and their connections are available in file 1.1 Genealogical Notes of this collection.