James Obediah Fitzgerald (26 November 1886–20 March 1968), physician and photographer, was the son of James Obediah Fitzgerald and Mary Robertson Shelton Fitzgerald and was born in Pelham, Caswell County, North Carolina, a few miles south of Danville, Virginia. He regularly appended "Jr." to his name even after the death of his namesake father. Fitzgerald received an A.B. from Guilford College in Greensboro in 1905, briefly studied immediately thereafter at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and in 1913 received an M.D. from Richmond's University College of Medicine, which merged that same year with the Medical College of Virginia (later part of Virginia Commonwealth University). Shortly thereafter on 6 June 1913 in Warrenton, North Carolina, he married Bertha Thweat Baugh, who had recently graduated from the training school for nurses at Memorial Hospital in Richmond. They had one son and one daughter.
Fitzgerald interned at Sheltering Arms Hospital in Richmond in 1913 and that year he and state bacteriologist Meade Ferguson received United States and Canadian patents for a flashlight attachment for revolvers. Fitzgerald soon began working as an assistant state bacteriologist for the Virginia State Board of Health. He was promoted to state bacteriologist on 15 July 1914 and served four years. Fitzgerald took part in the closing phase of the effort the Rockefeller Sanitation Commission funded to battle hookworm in the South, which measurably reduced infections but did not eradicate the pest. He helped perfect the Pasteur method that created vaccine from the brains of diseased animals for persons at risk of developing rabies. He also conducted a number of court-ordered autopsies.
On 1 August 1918 Fitzgerald went into service as a first lieutenant in the Medical Corps of the United States Army. After a month's training at the Rockefeller Institute in New York City, he was assigned to the Embarkation Hospital in Newport News. With his demobilization the following year, Fitzgerald began decades of private practice in Richmond. He also served as the pathologist at the Stuart Circle Hospital from 1920 to 1926. Fitzgerald was among those who performed blood transfusions directly from the arteries of donors to the veins of recipients, and he was a pioneer promoter in Virginia of physical therapy, with a special interest in the use of light to treat ailments.
Attracted to photography in part by his study of spectral therapy, Fitzgerald became an accomplished amateur. He joined the Richmond Camera Club in 1932, dropped the hobby for several years, and was principally active for about a decade beginning about 1936. Fitzgerald won roughly forty medals and had about five hundred of his photographs selected for inclusion in exhibitions in more than thirty states and twenty countries. In 1945 he had a one-man show of sixty photographs at the Smithsonian Institution. Fitzgerald's most frequently displayed image was a still life of clear glassware that reflected hundreds of intersecting lines. He eventually gave up photography to concentrate on his grandchildren and focus on other hobbies, such as developing his music library.
Fitzgerald's wife died of cancer on 11 February 1952. He married Emard Mary Quinn, a native Canadian who had worked as his office nurse for decades, on 12 October 1957. She died of cancer little more than a year later, on 17 February 1959. On 19 January 1960 in a suburb of Atlanta, Georgia, Fitzgerald married a Richmond woman, Josephine Verner Strother. James Obediah Fitzgerald died from a heart attack in his Richmond home on 20 March 1968, and was buried near his parents at Highland Burial Park in Danville.
Sources Consulted:
Brief biography in Richard Lee Morton, ed., Virginia Lives: The Old Dominion Who's Who (1964), 327; birth date self-reported on World War I Selective Service System Draft Registration Cards (1917–1918), Record Group 163, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C.; first marriage in Warren County, North Carolina, Marriage Register, and Richmond Times-Dispatch, 14 June 1913; second marriage in Marriage Certificate, Richmond City, Bureau of Vital Statistics (BVS), Commonwealth of Virginia Department of Health, Record Group 36, Library of Virginia; third marriage in Richmond Times-Dispatch, 20 Jan. 1960; Official Gazette of the United States Patent Office 197 (1913): 1208; Canadian Patent Office Record 42 (1914): 14–15; Virginia Health Commissioner, Annual Report (1913/1914), 92; (1917/1918), 55; (1918/1919), 8; Richmond News Leader, 28 July, 25 Oct. 1945, 4 May 1954; Death Certificate, City of Richmond, BVS; obituaries in Richmond News Leader and Richmond Times-Dispatch, both 21 Mar. 1968 (both with portrait), and Virginia Medical Monthly 95 (1968): 443–444.
Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by J. Jefferson Looney.
How to cite this page:
J. Jefferson Looney,"James Obediah Fitzgerald (1886–1968)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 2018 (http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.asp?b=Fitzgerald_James_Obediah, accessed [today's date]).
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