Rough start for Fort Lauderdale's first doctor

 

Thomas Simpson Kennedy (1859-1939), a North Carolinian, made his way to Florida after service with the U.S. Army during the Spanish American War.

“During my army experience … Florida was more talked about as a pioneer state for young men to go to than the old phrase ‘go west young man, go west,’ ” wrote Kennedy in his memoirs.

With army experience, two years of schooling in pharmacy and high hopes, he traveled south from Georgia by boat, rail and foot. After stopping in Titusville, then Jensen where pineapples were grown commercially, and Stuart, Kennedy couldn’t find work. The hard freezes of 1894 and 1895 had dealt farming an icy blow. His friend, John Mulligan, had purchased land south of Fort Lauderdale to grow citrus. He persuaded Kennedy to move to the outpost to try his hand at farming. Kennedy arrived in October 1899.

He began his life near the New River growing tomatoes (near current day Southwest 9th Street) but a yellow fever epidemic soon broke out, affecting all in the area, including Kennedy. He tended to patients – and his tomatoes – until the fever ran its course through “every man, woman and child … black and white.”

In 1900, before the epidemic ended, two doctors from the Federal Bureau of Health visited Kennedy to investigate his practicing medicine without a license. The tomato farmer told them there were no doctors there during the epidemic and that none had been allowed into the area, which was under quarantine. Satisfied after examining his patients, the federal agents arranged to pay Kennedy for his services. That money, plus proceeds from his farming efforts, provided the would-be doctor funds to complete his medical degree. He graduated from Sewanee Medical College in Tennessee January 1902.

With degree in hand, Kennedy resolved to “practice medicine full blast without a horse, without anything but my feet to walk on.” And that he did, from Miami to Stuart. If people couldn’t pick him up with horse and buggy, he’d take a train to visit patients. One steamy hot July day he took a train from Fort Lauderdale to Deerfield to tend to a family with typhoid. When finished, he began walking the 15 miles back to Fort Lauderdale and collapsed. A man with a hand car (small railroad car) came to his rescue. From that time on, if travelers were found ill, Dr. Kennedy was summoned. He eventually traveled with his own horse and buggy.

Successful tomato farmer and popular country doctor, Thomas S. Kennedy is counted among Fort Lauderdale’s colorful – and vital – early pioneers. 

Copyright© 2010. Jane Feehan. All rights reserved. 

Sources:

Broward Legacy, Vol. 6, No. 1-4. Thomas S. Kennedy: an autobiography of a country doctor.

http://fulltext10.fcla.edu/DLData/SN/SN01480340/0006_001/file71.pdf

Fort Lauderdale News, Jan. 28, 1979

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