Elisha Cullen Dick (15 March 1762–22 September 1825), physician, was born in Chester County, Pennsylvania, and was the son of Mary Barnard Hewes Dick and her second husband, Archibald Dick, a farmer and horse breeder who owned enslaved laborers. References in several Fairfax County deeds suggest that he may have adopted his middle name after reaching adulthood. Dick was educated at a Philadelphia academy and privately by two ministers. He studied medicine at the University of Pennsylvania with Benjamin Rush and William Shippen and received a Bachelor of Medicine degree in March 1782. Not long afterward Dick sold his share of his father's estate with the intention of setting up a practice in Charleston, South Carolina. Along the way, he found Alexandria to his liking and by September 1782 had decided to remain in Virginia. In October 1783 Dick married Hannah Harmon, also from Chester County, Pennsylvania. They had two daughters, one of whom died young, and one son.
Dick quickly became involved in his new community. He invested, not always successfully, in real estate and in shipping, and he sold medicines and medical instruments. Already a Freemason when he arrived in Virginia, he helped found the Alexandria Lodge in 1782. As its worshipful master from 1787 to April 1788 and again from 1789 to 1795, Dick presided over the laying of the first cornerstone of the District of Columbia on 15 April 1791 and, with George Washington, headed the Masonic procession and ceremonies for laying the cornerstone of the United States Capitol on 18 September 1793. Dick signed petitions on a wide range of matters from tobacco inspection and ratification of the United States Constitution to care of the poor, banking, and a library company, of which he was a founding director. He was a manager of George Washington's birthnight ball in 1792. As superintendent of quarantine beginning the following year, Dick was responsible for closing the port of Alexandria to ships from areas suspected of having epidemic diseases. A founding member of the Washington Society, a benevolent organization, in January 1800, he served as its president in 1810. He commanded a cavalry company during the Whiskey Rebellion and served as a patron of the Alexandria theater, justice of the peace, coroner in 1802, and mayor in 1804.
Dick is best known as one of the doctors who attended George Washington during his final illness. He had performed surgery on one of the Mount Vernon enslaved workers in February 1785, but he may have done no other work for Washington until he was summoned to Mount Vernon on 14 December 1799. The youngest of three physicians present, Dick suggested a tracheotomy, a rare and risky procedure, rather than traditional bleeding, but his colleagues Gustavus Brown and James Craik overruled him. Four days later, Dick led the Masonic rites at Washington's funeral, and he delivered a eulogy in Alexandria on 22 February 1800.
Dick and Craik published the first detailed account of Washington's illness and death in the 21 December 1799 issue of the Alexandria Times; and District of Columbia Daily Advertiser. It was reprinted early the next year as an appendix to the published funeral sermon delivered by Hezekiah N. Woodruff and prompted discussion in medical journals. Dick's other professional publications included a small booklet, Doctor Dick's Instructions for the Nursing and Management of Lying-in-Women: With Some Remarks Concerning the Treatment of New-Born Infants (1798), a short article on yellow fever in Alexandria published in the New York Medical Repository (1803), and an article on the contemporary diagnosis of Washington's fatal illness, "Facts and Observations relative to the Disease of Cynanche Trachealis, or Croup" in the Third Supplement to the Philadelphia Medical and Physical Journal (1809). Dick was a good singer and musician, and an artist of some skill who executed a copy of the James Sharples portrait of George Washington. Raised in the Church of England, he was a practicing Presbyterian and owned enslaved laborers for many years. After a change of conscience, he emancipated his last remaining slave in 1811, joined the local Quaker meeting in 1812, and also allegedly threw his dueling pistols into the Potomac River.
Dick declared bankruptcy in 1801 but recovered his financial health. He owned a townhouse in Alexandria and a 170-acre farm in Fairfax County. Elisha Cullen Dick retired from the practice of medicine in 1820 and died in Alexandria on 22 September 1825. He was buried in an unmarked grave in the town's Quaker cemetery.
Sources Consulted:
Biographies in F. L. Brockett, The Lodge of Washington: A History… (1876), 128–129, Thomas-Maxwell Potts, Bi-Centenary Memorial of Jeremiah Carter… (1883), 75–80, and J. M. Toner, "A Sketch of the Life of Elisha Cullen Dick, of Alexandria, Va.," Medical Society of Virginia Transactions (1885), 267–279; birth and marriage dates in James A. Pearce (great-grandson) to J. M. Toner, 20 Aug. 1885 (photocopy), Alexandria Public Library; some family history in John Hill Martin, Chester (And Its Vicinity,) Delaware County, in Pennsylvania (1877), 393, 395–396; James Craik and Dick, Appendix to Hezekiah N. Woodruff, Sermon, Occasioned by the Death of Gen. George Washington (1800), 14–16; Dick, "Oration," in The Washingtoniana: Containing a Biographical Sketch of the Late Gen. George Washington (1800), 195–206; "Doctors Craik, Brown and Dick," American Historical Record 2 (1873): 506–508; Memoirs of Samuel M. Janney (1881), 9–10, 17–20, 23–24; Gay Montague Moore, Seaport in Virginia: George Washington's Alexandria (1949), 162–171; oil portrait in Alexandria-Washington Lodge No. 22; Ellen G. Miles, Saint-Mémin and the Neoclassical Profile Portrait in America (1994), 135 (portrait); Alexandria City Hustings Court Deed Book, U:445; will and estate inventory in Fairfax Co. Will Book, O-1:53–55, 152–164; death notice in Fredericksburg Virginia Herald, 28 Sept. 1825 (died "in the 72d year of his age"), and Washington Daily National Intelligencer, 30 Sept. 1825.
St. Mémin engraving courtesy Library of Congress.
Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by Mary V. Thompson.
How to cite this page:
Mary V. Thompson, "Elisha Cullen Dick (1762–1825)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 2024 (http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.asp?b=Dick_Elisha_Cullen, accessed [today's date]).
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