John S. Ely

Dr. John Slade Ely, when elected to The Century, in 1893, at the age of thirty-two had completed the preliminary study of his profession—the physician of his type hardly ceases study—and was Assistant in Pathology at the College of Physicians and Surgeons, where he was graduated in 1886. He had also pursued his studies in the Sheffield Scientific School, at Johns Hopkins, in Germany, and in Paris, and besides his duties at the College of Physicians and Surgeons he was Professor of Histology and Pathological Anatomy in the Woman’s Medical College. In 1897 he accepted the position of Professor of the Theory and Practice of Medicine in the Yale Medical School, which he held until his untimely death at the age of forty-five. His reputation at Yale was peculiar, and very high. “A master of the science of pathology and an extraordinarily able teacher,” was said of him by President Hadley. “Not a dry-as-dust, bound hand and foot to one subject,” writes one of his associates; “a man eminent indeed in his own line, but of wide familiarity and interest in other subjects, and wider in his human sympathy than in anything else.”

Edward Cary
1907 Century Association Yearbook