OLIVER FATEFIELD AVADSWORTH. 



Born, Boston. April 26, 1838. 

 Died, Boston, November 29, 1911. 



Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 

 Class 2, Section 4, January 11, 1899. 



Among Dr. Wadsworth's dominant characteristics were his fairness, 

 his kindliness and his accuracy in observation and in statement; his 

 fairness was exemplified in the justice of his appreciation of the work 

 of his fellows in school, in college, and in professional life; his kindli- 

 ness in the numberless human contacts which were a part of the 

 experience of his hospital and private practice, extending over nearly 

 half a century, and his accuracy was traceable to a parentage which 

 made exactitude a daily practice and a continuous obligation. 



Graduating from Harvard College in 1860, and not altogether 

 satisfied with his own estimate of the value of his work there, although 

 he had excelled in some of his studies and been always a joyous parti- 

 cipator, and one of the leaders, in athletics, desirous of strenuous 

 effort at accomplishment, he departed from accustomed and easy 

 ways and made out into the then new west, taking up land near Den- 

 ver and entering upon a farming proposition including the construc- 

 tion of an irrigating system sufficient in extent to occupy the major 

 part of his two years of residence there. To the planning and execu- 

 tion of this work there must have been applied the inherent traits 

 exhibited by his father in the admirable surveys, which are a synonym 

 for reliability, faculties which showed themselves later in Dr. Wads- 

 worth in other ways. The journey westward, a part of it in the most 

 primitive of conveyances, and the self enforced residence with a stated 

 task, was penitential in that it sought to wrest something tangible 

 from his graduate days in compensation for what he deemed to have 

 been lack of success in his undergraduate career. That this opinion 

 was born of Dr. Wadsworth's moderate estimate of himself, as con- 

 trasted with his sense of duty and his aspirations, is set forth by the 

 opinion of his classmates and, more authoritatively, in the recorded 



