Item 284 - Letter to Harvey Cushing, January 26, 1926

Eleanor Corkhill Adams Addison was born on March 17, 1875, in Defiance, Ohio, the daughter of Dr. Edward T. and Jeanette F. (Lamb) Adams.

She was a poet. She grew up in Toronto, Canada and attended Bishop Strachan School. She married William Henry Fitzgerald Addison (1880-1963) in Toronto on December 25, 1905. Addison was a graduate of the University of Toronto and the University College. He came to the University of Pennsylvania in 1905 when he was appointed as a Demonstrator of Normal Histology. Shortly after he received his M.D. from the University in 1917, he became a full Professor of Normal Histology and Embryology in the School of Medicine. Eleanor moved with her husband to Philadelphia. Her first work as a poet, “Nonamessett, and Other Verses,” was published in Philadelphia by Westbrook Publishing Company in 1928. Her next book of poetry, “Sonnets from a Masque of Love,” was published by the Mitre Press in London in 1931. During the next ten years, she published three more compilations. Eleanor and William moved to Mount Vernon, New York when William retired from the University of Pennsylvania in 1948. They lived with their daughter Agnes Eleanor Addison (wife of John M. Gilchrist).

Eleanor died on December 19, 1948, in Mount Vernon, New York.