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An intensely American family training, added to a worthy ambition, has undoubtedly been what has helped to make Dr. Gerardus Hilles Wynkoop what he is to-day. His father was the Rev. Stephen Rose Wynkoop, son of David Wynkoop of Pennsylvania and Mary Van Horn. The Rev. Stephen was born in 1806 and graduated from Union College in 1829. Some few years after graduating, he went on an exploring expedition to the western coast of Africa as a commissioner on behalf of the American Board of Foreign Missions for the purpose of exploring that region and to find whether or not it was available for a missionary station. The Rev. Stephen commenced to study theology at the Theological Seminary connected with Princeton College, and later became pastor of the first Presbyterian Church of Wilmington, Del., occupying the pastorate for twenty years. He died at the age of seventy years. His wife was Aurelia Mills, the daughter of Judge Mills, of New Haven, Conn. Thus one may gather, from the stock, some idea of the excellent training and advantages the son of such parents must have had. Dr. Gerardus Hilles Wynkoop was born fifty-four years ago, and went to three or four different private schools and seminaries as a boy. He went to Yale University when he was seventeen years old and graduated after the proper interval. It was during his course at Yale that young Wynkoop first took his real interest in anatomy and pathology and when he left the University and came to New York he began to study medicine under the tutelage of Dr. Willard Parker - which is another way of saying that the keynote of his pursuit of medical knowledge was thoroughness. Dr. Wynkoop has been in general practice in New York for something over thirty years. In 1866 he married Anne Eliza Woodbury, the daughter of General Daniel Phineas Woodbury, of the United States Engineer Corps. He has had four children: Gerardus Mills, a member of the Union and City Clubs; Kate Childs, the wife of Harold Stanley Forwood, eldest son of Sir William B. Forwood; Daniel Woodbury, and Elizabeth Hilles Wynkoop. Dr. Wynkoop's brother, by the way, the Reverend Theodore Stephen Wynkoop, four years older than the doctor, was also at Yale and was for many years in charge of a station at Allahabad, Northern India. Dr. Wynkoop has the pleasant advantage of being able to trace his descent in an unbroken line to one Peter Wynkoop who came to New Netherland in 1639. The doctor, it should be said, is thoroughly up-to-date in his treatment of patients and is an enthusiastic student of all that is new in medical science, discriminating, with an eagle eye, between the real and the false, which not all modern physicians do. Lionel Stagge.
Source:
Stagge, Lionel, "Dr. Wynkoop, of New York City.",
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