Minerd.com Biography of Dr. Edward Skiddy and Estella (Hayden) Quintard of New York City

Estella married Edward Skiddy Quintard, M.D. (1867-1936) on June 5, 1894, when she was age 26, and he 27. He was born in Stamford, CT, the son of Edward Augustus and Mary (Skiddy) Quintard, and was related through his mother to president Zachary Taylor.

During his storied career, Edward was an outstanding medical practitioner and educator, but also was the personal physician to many celebrities. Perhaps the best known was Samuel Langhorne Clemens -- better known as the best-selling author Mark Twain -- and in fact Edward was at Twain's deathbed at the end.

In reporting on their nuptials, the New York Times said they were "one of the prettiest and most important weddings yesterday" and were held "at the apartments of the bride's parents, in the Valencia, West Fifty-ninth Street." Rev. George H. Houghton, rector of the church of the Transfiguration, performed the ceremony. Among the relatives and friends in the wedding party were best man William I. Quintard (brother) and ushers Dr. Brenton Clemens, Stephen B. Stanton, Samuel K. Stanton, Richard Tighe Wainwright, Robert Coleman Le Roy, William Y. O'Connor, Albert Bergman and Frederick W. Stickney (of Boston). The maid of honor was Estella's sister Mabel Hayden, while the bridesmaids were Jane Hutchinson, Jane Hayden (sister), Maude and Florence Quintard (cousins), and Elsie Holdeman (of Pittsburgh).

Edward traveled extensively as a youth with his father on business trips to England, France and Germany. In 1887, he graduated from the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons.

Estella and Edward are listed in the New York Social Register for 1918, with their address reported as 145 West 58th Street. They later made their home at 1050 Fifth Avenue.

Edward served for many years as a professor of medicine at the New York Post-Graduate Medical School and Hospital. The building was located at the corner of 20th Street and Second Avenue in Manhattan and is seen at left in a rare old postcard view.

He is pictured and extensively profiled in the 1919 book, History of Medicine in New York, Volume V, authored by James J. Walsh. In the section devoted to Edward, the book reported the following:

... [an] eminent specialist in internal medicine of New York, is vice-president, medical director and professor of the New York Post-Graduate Medical School. Whether as physician, educator, author, or important factor in the affairs of leading medical institutions, Dr. Quintard is characterized by abilities of a high order. As vice-president and medical director of the ... Medical School and Hospital, his activities therewith cover the most noteworthy period of development and growth in the history of the institution and to that development Dr. Quintard has contributed in full measure.

He also authored medical papers such as "Hepato-Intestinal-Toxemia" (Contributions to the Science of Medicine and Surgery by the Faculty of the New York Post-Graduate Medical School [1908]) and "Report on Two Cases of Tubercular Stenosis of the Ileum (The Post-Graduate: A Monthly Journal of Medicine and Surgery [1909]).

Edward served a variety of patients, and among them were celebrities such as Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens). He also is known to have had a connection with Africa explorer Henry Morton Stanley who was famed for his 1867 search for missing missionary and explorer David Livingstone in Tanzania and then his quote when the two if them finally met -- "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?"

The origin of the friendship with Twain is not yet understood. He and the Quintards are known to have exchanged letters in 1904, with Edward's notes preserved today by the Mark Twain Project at the University of California's Bancroft Library. In one letter, written on Edward's 145 West 58th Street stationery, he wrote: "Dear Mr. Clemens: Your letter was received last night... in fact I read the letter, and the effect was all that could be desired -- incidentally it did the doctor as much good as the patient." At Christmas 1908, Edward wrote: The Quintard family thanks you in full measure for thinking of them at Christmas tide. We send our love and affection unstinted ... from the heart."

When Twain celebrated his 70th birthday in early December 1905, Edward attended a dinner in the author's honor at the famed Delmonico's Restaurant in Lower Manhattan, and was pictured in a special souvenir edition of Harper's Weekly magazine. The dinner was organized by Twain's publisher, Col. George Harvey of Harper & Bros., and editor of the North American Review. Attended by some 170 friends and fellow authors, the dinner featured "a great many toasts and tributes and poems, and telegrams of congratulations from everybody from President Theodore Roosevelt down," remembered Life Magazine 39 years later, in 1944. "As usual, Mark Twain made the best speech of the evening."

Among the notable guests at Twain's dinner were famed naturalist John Burroughs; steel industrialist and philanthropist Andrew and Mrs. Carnegie; Willa Cather, Pulitzer Prize winning author of O Pioneers! and My Antonia; Native American physician and author Charles A. Eastman; Little Lord Fauntleroy author Frances Hodgson Burnett; Atlantic Monthly editor and American Academy of Arts and Letters president William Dean Howells; George Washington biographer Rupert Hughes; Perils of Pauline author Howard McGrath; literary executor of Elizabeth Bacon Custer, General Custer's widow, Marguerite Merington; Twain biographer and Pulitzer Prize committee member Albert Bigelow Paine; magazine writer and future best-selling author of books on etiquette and good manners; and Standard Oil's most senior and powerful board director, Henry H. Rogers, who helped reorganize Twain's financial condition.

Edward, far left, pictured in Harper's Weekly as an invited guest at Mark Twain's 70th birthday dinner at Delmonico's in New York. He is seated with, left to right: Louise Morgan Sill, Caroline Ticknor, Dr. C.C. Rose, Olivia Howard Dunbar, Weymer Jay Mills, Bert Leston Taylor, Gabrielle Jackson.

Edward himself was was seated at the Twain celebration with poet and literary translator Louise Morgan Sill; writer and biographer Caroline Ticknor; digestive medicine expert Dr. C.C. Rice; short story writer Oliva Howard Dunbar; fiction book author Weymer Jay Mills; Chicago Tribune journalist and humorist Berg Leston Taylor; and author Gabrielle Jackson.

In the summer of 1908, Twain suffered from severe chest pain. Edward traveled from New York for to make a personal examination. He is mentioned for this episode in Albert Bigelow Paine's biography, Mark Twain: A Biography, which initially was published in installments in Harper's Magazine. Wrote Paine, Edward "did not hesitate to say that the trouble proceeded chiefly from the heart, and counseled diminished smoking, with less active exercise, advising particularly against Clemens's lifetime habit of lightly skipping up and down stairs."

I love you beyond all words, beyond all measure of words, you who have been such splendid and noble and exalted thoughts and for us all.... I sent Miss Gordon because I know what a tremendous help she can be to you and she is to let me hear at once. I cannot tell Estella, she has been so very ill. I dare not speak of anything so tragic and sad lest the shock be more than she could stand. Her love for you is deeper and truer than you ever can know, as for it, it is only her condition that prevents my coming to you at once. God knows my heat and sentiments and love are with you every moment.

As Twain lay dying just four months later, on April 21, 1910, Edward was at his bedside. During that time, the patient was slipping away. In the biography, Paine elegantly captured the scene:

During the afternoon,, while [daughter] Clara stood by him, he sank into a doze, and from it passed into a deeper slumber and did not heed us any more. Through that peaceful spring afternoon the lifewave ebbed lower and lower. It was about half-past six, and the sun lay just on the horizon, when Dr. Quintard noticed that the breathing, which had gradually become more subdued, broke a little. There was no suggestion of any struggle. The noble head turned a little to one side, there was a fluttering sigh, and the breath that had been unceasing for seventy-four tumultuous years had stopped forever.

Following Twain's death, Edward was one of 5,000 who "crowded Carnegie Hall ... to honor the memory of Mark Twain," said the Publisher's Weekly. "While almost every one of prominent in the literary life and activity of the Eastern half of the country, was present, there were many others besides, representing business, finance, and all the professions." Among the best-known personalities in the audience for the memorial was J.P. Morgan and Mrs. Andrew Carnegie.

In May 1895, Edward allowed his friend Henry Morton Stanley -- who recently had been elected to Parliament, and some decades before who had searched Africa for a missing explorer and when finding him uttered the famous quote, "Dr. Livingston, I presume?" -- to enjoy the privileges of the St. Nicholas Club in New York during a two-week visit. The St. Nicholas Club is seen here.

News articles and resulting books of the period show that among others, Edward counted as patients Lord Beaverbrook (British Parliament member and newspaper publisher Max Aitken), James Abercrombie Burden (banker and ironmaster) and Otto Theodore Hess (head of the law firm Hess, Churchill & Marlow on Broadway).

In the area of literature, Edward was considered a writer of "genius and ability," said the History of Medicine. He achieved literary fame as the author of a number of books of poetry, many if not all of them privately published.

Among them were Sonnets (printed in 1900); Sea Babies and Other Babies; Battle Hymn and Litany; Extra Muros and Other Essays; From a Window; and Vernal Tides and A La St. Terre; among the known titles.

Edward's book of poems, Sonnets..., inscribed "To E.H.Q.," his wife

Sadly, Estella died on March 27, 1926, at the age of 60. She was laid to rest in the Hayden family's impressive, ornate mausoleum at Kensico Cemetery near White Plains, Westchester County, NY. A portion of the lettering on her crypt is seen here.

Edward, who must have had many female admirers, did not remain a widower for long. He married again the following year, to Lucy P. (Jones) Flagg, widow of John Flagg.

As a measure of the esteem in which he was held, Edward was named a Fellow of the American College of Physician, Congress of Internal Medicine and New York Academy of Medicine.

Edward was a collector of original paintings. One of his possessions was "View of Segovia," painted by Ernest Lawson (1873-1939), which later was owned by J.P. Rogers and Dr. and Mrs. Arthur Chace. In December 2003, the artwork was sold by Sotheby's for $31,000.

While in Chattanooga, TN, traveling home with Lucy after attending a board of regents meeting at the University of the South, Edward suffered a heart attack. He died the same day, at the age of 69, on Feb. 12, 1936. Just a little more than a week before his sudden passing, he had told a New York Times reporter that he was "contemplating devoting his entire next Summer, which he planned to pass at his country estate, Knolly Brook, at Norfolk, Conn., to the writing of a book to be called the 'Knolly Brook Essays'." Yet he instructed his interviewer, "Don't print that yet. I don't like to tell in advance what I am going to do, because something might change my plans."

His remains were returned to New York for burial at Kensico Cemetery. Unlike Estella, he does not rest in the Hayden mausoleum, but rather out of doors, in a grave marked with a simple cross. Edward's obituary in the New York Times mentioned Estella as well as his second wife.

Dr. Quintard's portrait is from History of Medicine in New York, Vol. V, by James J. Walsh (1919). Twain portrait and bedroom images courtesy of the Library of Congress - American Memory Project. Quintard/Twain photo courtesy of the University of Virginia Library. Quintard letter courtesy of the Mark Twain Project, University of California Bancroft Library. Kensico mausoleum and grave photographs courtesy of Linda Burton Kochanov.