James Meredith Mathews

Reading's Physician Poet James Meredith Mathews

Dr. James Meredith Mathews practiced medicine for 50 years, tending to patients in Reading (rhymes with "breading"), Pennsylvania, until his death in 1910 at age 93. To his community, he was well-known not only for his medical practice but also for his poetry, which he occasionally had printed in the local newspaper, "The Reading Times." Now his descendant, Alyce Wilson, has gathered those poems together, along with others Dr. Mathews had printed on leaflets by a local printer. Although they are likely only a small portion of the poems he wrote in his long lifetime, these poems share his insights into the medical field, the social world of doctors, current events, and the nature of life and death itself.