John Derby Smith

John Derby Smith (April 9, 1812 – April 26, 1884), was an American minister, physician, and Massachusetts state legislator. Smith, the youngest son of Nathan Smith, Doctor of Medicine, Professor of Medicine in Dartmouth College, was born in Hanover, New Hampshire, April 9, 1812. The year after his birth his father became the head of the newly organized Medical Institution of Yale College. He graduated from Yale College in 1832. In 1833 he entered the Yale Divinity School, and after two years there and two in the Andover Theological Seminary, he was licensed to preach in 1837. After a brief employment as acting pastor in Athol, Massachusetts, he was ordained, November 20, 1839, pastor of the Second Congregational Church in Charlemont, Massachusetts, where he continued until August 11, 1844. Then, on the partial failure of his health, he took up the study of medicine, and received a diploma from the Baltimore Medical College in 1846. In June 1848, he was resettled over his former charge in Charlemont, which he finally left in May 1852, though for some time longer residing in the town, which he represented in the State Legislature in 1854. He supplied the pulpit in Berkley, Massachusetts, from 1854 to 1858, and in Douglas, Massachusetts, from 1860 to 1863, when he entered the U.S. Army as a contract-surgeon.