Dr. Gershom H. Hill, physician, superintendent and man of affairs.- There is an indefinable quality that distinguishes some men which is still waiting for a name. So fine is this endowment or this combination of excellencies that its presence can be detected only by results. Its possessor the world likes because he is a man who does things. A visitor will say, "He is the man for me because he brings things to pass. He succeeds in doing the thing to be done."

   Dr. Gershom H. Hill, superintendent of the Iowa Hospital for the Insane at Independence, either possessed naturally or in the school of experience acquired an administrative ability of a very high order. A peculiar field exists for the display of his capacities which has seemed to call him out at all his strong points.

    "In the best sense," exclaims the editor of an Iowa paper, who has known him intimately from youth, at the time of Dr. Hill's election to his present office, "he is a self-made man, having secured his education and paid for it by his own industry, working his way through college, and through all obstacles to his present enviable but worthily earned position. Many of his college friends, and the people of the town who remember him in those days, have a thrill of generous, grateful pride as they learn of his recent promotion. Few men can give a better account of their talents, time and opportunities or furnish an example more worthy."

   Dr. Edward Hornibrook, a physician of exceptional attainments and observation, who, by particular studies and by official relations as well as by close acquaintance, has had all of the best means of forming a fair estimate of the work of Dr. Hill, affirms: "It is the best conducted hospital I ever saw. There is more done to alleviate the misery and distress, more done toward promoting the bodily health, of the patients, more done to make the hospital as little irksome as possible for the patients, more done to furnish good food and clothing, to furnish the hospital with proper ventilation, than in any other hospital I ever saw."   One of the plainest observations to those that know Dr. Hill's lineage is that he was well born. In the case of horses, for example, it is worth much to belong to a good family. It carries actual value. If one's education must begin in the minds of his ancestors, and if one may have great good fortune in choosing good parents from whom to be born, Dr. Hill's success began at this point.

   His father, Rev. James J. Hill, was of heroic mold, joining upon his graduation at Andover the "Iowa Band," who came as home missionaries to Iowa, when a Territory, and here in a rude house, May 8, 1846, Dr. Hill was born. His mother, Sarah E. (Hyde) Hill, of Bath, Maine, entered with whole-souled ardor into the self-denying labors of those primitive days, saying with characteristic vigor and enthusiasm, "Somebody must be built into these foundations." These parents, be it ever said as a memorial of them, gave the first dollar to found Iowa College, now the mother of patriots and ministers and missionaries and scholars, at Grinnell. Besides Dr. Hill, the only other survivor of this original Iowa family is his brother, Rev. James L. Hill, D. D., of Salem, Massachusetts.

   The subject of our sketch is farther fortunate in that his peculiar abilities seem exactly to meet the times. During his day the whole trend of things has been toward organization. It is an age-drift. Everybody who wants to do anything or wants others to do anything must have the ability to erect his idea into some simple form of allied labor. Here Dr. Hill is an acknowledged master. Responsible for everything, he works through others, not imperiously but with such firm command of the situation as it is, with such thoroughness and attention to details that the success of the hospital is found in its associated life and effort. With the bee it is the making of the wax that costs, and so it is that the receptacle or form of a thing is quite as indicative of genius as the sweets that fill it.

   Another remarkable thing about Dr. Hill is his versatility. In his work this capacity for a variety of things is supremely manifest. If you can name another man who can excel him in one point or another, it would prove nothing. There are few men, if any, that can combine so many points as he.It is not enough to fix upon one little point and insist that some one else represents it in a higher degree of excellency. We' must look at the totality of any man's character and of any man's work and of any man's, service and judge it not by its specific points but by its wholeness and massiveness. A man's work often furnishes the best character sketch that can possibly be drawn.

   A hospital requires professional abilities of the highest order. Its conduct, too, must furnish an unquestioned model. Progressiveness in the care of the herds and of the farm must set the pace for others. While this biographical sketch was being written a report comes from the board of trustees of the hospital, who have been meeting in regular session, as follows: "We have not been able to discover where more could be done for the happiness and comfort of the inmates."

   We next catalogue his great talent for silence. He knows how like Von Moltke to hold his tongue in seven languages. As with General Grant, so with Dr. Hill: in dealing with all sorts and sizes of tempers, this is a prime excellence. His pastor, who knew him intimately, said that the most impressive thing about his conduct of his great hospital family of 1,100 persons, domiciled by the State at an expense of over a million dollars, "was its quietness. If Dr. Hill should hold excited and noisy disputes with employees who displease him the disturbance would spread like a contagion from the central adminstrative offices to the outmost wards."

   No separate mention is made of his uncommon common sense (old English word, "wisdom"), for it is doubted whether that quality even when possessed in the highest degree, is in itself distinctively so much an attribute as it is a blending of characteristics and gifts, of which good judgment, marked with consistency and accuracy, with the entire absence of extravagance or eccentricity, forms a part. He sees clearly the relative importance of things. He seems to divest himself almost entirely of the bids of personal interest, partiality and prejudice. The thing most frequently remarked about him is his  noise. He is absolutely "unstampedable."

   In his relation to his life work it is these dictates of native good sense, that incomparable judgment, this happy combination of talents and energies and the harmonious union of the intellectual and moral frames that mark and distinguish him. He deliberates slowly but decides surely and usually irreversibly. In the choice of words to express forcibly and precisely his meaning he is almost scrupulous. He is imperturbably kind, yet duty is the ruling principle of his conduct. No one can fellow farther along this line without soon receiving some suggestion of his very pronounced Christian character. The writer once noted his use of the peculiar petition that his administration of the hospital, being carried on in the spirit of the Golden Rule, might be so conducted that the most unfortunate persons under his care would be treated as he himself would wish to be dealt with if the conditions were reversed.

   Dr. Hill is not only a director in the Young Men's Christian Association of Independence, but he is also an elder in the First Presbyterian Church. He is never absent from its Sunday morning service or its mid-week meeting unless forbidden by some contrary duty. The regularity of his life is phenomenal. To a visitor, in winter, his matinal meal seems a little early, but it appears that a man can form what habits he pleases and custom will make them easy. He as not spent a day in bed since he can remember. During his more than twenty-one years' connection with the hospital he has never been absent from the table at any one meal.

   His home life is singularly felicitous. On January 9, 1879, he married Miss Louisa B. Ford, of Lynn, Massachusetts, a young lady whose figure and face, manners, intelligence and winsome character would mark her in any city of New England as the conspicuous one among a thousand. The mating of these two people is characterized by that best of qualities in blended life-genuine and hearty and affectionate comradeship. Mrs. Hill presides with rare grace and tact at a table at which governors and philanthropists and persons of the highest position in church and State are often guests. She is in active sympathy with her husband in his work for the less fortunate members of the human family, and supports him in the high religious position from which he views all the duties and responsibilities of his taxing, exacting life. Their only child, Miss Julia, bids fair to be worthy of her lineage and of the pains that are being taken with her education.

   Dr. Hill himself graduated at Iowa College at Grinnell in 1871, and at Rush Medical College in Chicago in 1874, subsequently taking post-graduate studies in New York and at Harvard University. The studies of his youth were interrupted by the service of his country in the field, being a member of Company B in the Forty-sixth Regiment of Iowa Infantry. He is now a member for life of the board of trustees of his alma mater, which college, too, conferred upon him in 1891 the honorary degree of Master of Arts. He is a lecturer on insanity in the medical department of the State University of Iowa at Iowa City. He is honored also by being appointed one of the building commissioners of the Iowa Hospital for the Insane at Cherokee. It may not be too much to say that his influence in securing the establishment of this institution at Cherokee and in determining the appointment of the three superintendents of existing hospitals as members ex officio of the building commission was fully equal to that of any other man in the State. His work in the interest of the insane is not restricted to the walls of his own institution or to the counties tributary to it. By voice and pen he has done much to develop in Iowa and elsewhere the principle for which he has always strongly stood, that all insane persons who cannot be comfortably cared for in their own homes by their own relatives, having the freedom of the house and fireside, also eating at the same table with the rest of the family, should be cared for in State institutions and none of them in county asylums.  

   Dr. Hill has been president of the Buchanan County Medical Society for sixteen consecutive years. He has also been president of the Cedar Valley Medical Association. He is an honorary member of the Dubuque County Medical Society and of the Austin Flint Medical Society, also a member of the Fayette County Medical Society, of the Iowa State Medical Society, of the American Medical Association, of the American Academy of Medicine; of the Medico-Legal Society of New York, and of the American Medico-Psychological Association. The best things in Dr. Hill's life lie ahead. He is now exactly in his prime. His life hitherto has been, in an important sense, preparative. He is a specialist. Here experience counts. His life is not yet dwarfed into a reminiscence. He has the habit of industry, and it will now grow easier to obtain success, after success has been so organized, to plant the banner on the heights up which it has been so gallantly carried.