Background
Disbrow was born on March 19, 1861 in Newark, New Jersey, United States. He was the son of Henry G. and Catherine Cline (Clickencr) Disbrow.
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William Stephen Disbrow
Edit ProfileEducation
Disbrow's early life was a struggle for education and professional training, but by dint of hard work in factories and drug stores he paid his way through the New York College of Pharmacy (Doctor of Pharmacy, 1880) and the medical department of the University of the City of New York (Doctor of Medicine, 1887).
Career
After a year in North Adams, Massachusetts, as a chemist with the Zylonite Company, Disbrow returned in 1888 to his native Newark, and spent the remaining thirty-four years of his life in the practise of medicine. His private practise was large, but since his generosity to needy patients was also large it never became especially lucrative. Though his professional career was unusually successful and beneficent, Disbrow’s chief claim to remembrance is as a collector. His principal fields were the natural sciences, medical history, and numismatics, but almost anything that interested him and that he thought might interest some one else he gathered in.
Achievements
Personality
Disbrow was a burly man with great physical and mental powers and a voracious appetite for knowledge, he threw into his hobbies such energy as few men can devote to the main business of their lives. His principal fields were the natural sciences, medical history, and numismatics, but almost anything that interested him and that he thought might interest some one else he gathered in. Whenever an old family was broken up, an old house abandoned, an old cemetery removed, Disbrow was on hand to inquire whether papers, relics, or inscriptions were to be had. He examined every excavation for a new building lest some deposit of sand or clay or some stratum of rock escape him. pictures and maps. Housed during the latter years of Disbrow’s life on the fourth floor of the Newark Public Library, where he spent the long hot summer days in classifying and labeling his materials, it became after his death the science collection of the Newark Museum.
Interests
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Disbrow ransacked the old bookstores almost daily and kept his eyes open for objects of interest when visiting factories and the homes of his patients. But if he took a freebooter’s joy in collecting stamps, coins, medical medals, plants and flowers, weapons, pottery, Indian curios, rocks, minerals, crystals, shells, gums, seeds, fossils, books, pamphlets, maps, pictures, and portraits of physicians, he was generous in bestowing his finds on institutions and on other private collectors; indeed much of his material came to him from men who wished to make some return for the lavish generosity that he had shown them. He was not, as one might suppose, an indiscriminate collector: the range and exactness of his information were amazing. The chief beneficiaries of his collecting were the Smithsonian Institution, the United States National Museum, and the Surgeon-General’s Library in Washington, and the Academy of Medicine of Northern New Jersey, the New Jersey Historical Society, and the Newark Museum Association in Newark, to which he gave his largest collection. This consisted of 74, 000 science specimens, 5, 000 scientific books, 10, 000 pamphlets, and 5, 000 pictures and maps.
Connections
Disbrow married Clara E. Valentine in 1888.
