David Sloane Conant

Son of carpenter and militia Colonel Jonathan Conant (1793-1863), David learned his father's trade before preparing for college at the Thetford (VT) Academy (1847-48), then studying medicine. He was a physician in New Hampshire and New York (1851-54), and lecturer in anatomy, physiology, and surgery at Bowdoin, the University of Vermont, and New York Medical College from 1855-1865. He was also noted as a muscular athlete and accomplished boxer. In 1860 he was a 35 year old doctor living with his 5 year old son Granville (1855-1870) in New York City.

At about the time of the Maryland Campaign he volunteered for service in the field, and treated wounded soldiers at the Locust Spring field hospital on the Geeting farm near Keedysville, MD by 18 September 1862 and for "several weeks" afterward.

He returned to teaching medicine and in 1863 operated to remove a cancerous tumor from his father's neck - an operation said to have prolonged life.

He died of septicemia which had progressed from a small infected spot on his face around his nose, through his eye, and to his brain over a period of about a week.

His work at Locust Spring from the compiled service record of Lt T.F. Mulloy, 8th South Carolina, one of his patients. Personal details from his 1866 Memorial [pdf], the Transactions of the Medical Society of the State of New York (March 1866), family genealogists, and the US Census of 1860. His gravesite is on Findagrave. His picture from a photograph in Thetford Academy ... Seventy-fifth Anniversary and Reunion (1895).

He married Mary Preston Sanborn (1829-1860) in 1852 and they had a son. He married again, Mary Weston Larrabee (1830-1866) in April 1861 and they had a daughter Lucy (1864-1952).

01/21/1825; Lyme, NH

10/08/1865; New York City, NY; burial in Green-Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn, NY