The Founder

Dr. John Pomeroy’s gravestone at Burlington’s Elmwood Cemetery and his home (above, right) in Burlington.

DR. JOHN POMEROY

Just inside the gates of Burlington’s Elmwood Cemetery lies the most prominent of its memorials, a carved granite block that marks the resting place of Dr. John Pomeroy and his family members. But in a way, a larger monument to the doctor lies a mile up the hill overlooking the city: the College of Medicine that his effort, more than any other, brought into being.

Pomeroy, a Revolutionary War veteran, moved from Connecticut to Cambridge in 1787, in what was then the Republic of Vermont. In 1792, having married his wife, Mary, he moved to Burlington, and his thriving practice enabled him to build the substantial brick house—said to be the first brick house in the town—that stands to this day on lower Battery Street.

The doctor was an early trustee of the fledgling University of Vermont. In 1804 Pomeroy was the first medical faculty appointee at UVM, as a lecturer in “anatomy and chirurgery.” Around then he began taking in apprentices at his home office, then the predominate pathway to becoming a physician. Pomeroy’s skills were legendary: according to one notable account, he performed a tracheotomy aboard a canal boat on Lake Champlain using the hollow tube of a goose quill as a cannula.

In the years after the War of 1812, Pomeroy began the first formal medical lectures at the university, and in 1814 he was one of the three founders of what is now the Vermont Medical Society. In 1822 Pomeroy was part of a group, along with the prominent medical educator, Nathan Smith, who organized the first official series of lectures at what would later be called the College of Medicine. But Pomeroy’s name, for reasons that are still unknown, would never formally appear on the “Medical Department” faculty rolls. He continued to practice medicine in Burlington until 1834, ten years before his death. His name is carried today by Pomeroy Hall, the cupolatopped building just south of the UVM Green, that in 1829 became the first dedicated home of the College of Medicine.