Gouverneur Emerson

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Gouverneur Emerson (August 4, 1795 – July 2, 1874) was an American physician, traveler, and agriculturalist.

Born near Dover, Delaware, he was the eldest of seven children in a Quaker family. He studied medicine from age sixteen and earned his medical degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1816. After an early practice near Montrose, Pennsylvania, he served as a surgeon on a merchant ship to China, a voyage he described in his journals and which included an incident with pirates on the return trip.

Back in the United States, he settled in Philadelphia. During a yellow fever outbreak, he worked as an attending physician at the City Dispensary and helped push laws to control smallpox; he wrote on smallpox statistics and public health. In 1833 he was elected to the American Philosophical Society.

Emerson later turned more to farming. He edited the Farmer’s Encyclopedia and Dictionary of Rural Affairs and gradually left medical practice in 1857 to devote himself to political economy and social science. He died on July 2, 1874.