Philip Greth Smith was born in Bern township, Berks County, Pa., in 1810 and educated at Mt. St. Mary's College, Maryland, reading medicine with his brother-in-law, Dr. Daniel Deppen, of Bernville. In the fall of 1835 he married Louisa G. Allgaler, of Reading, and moved to Lebanon, where he engaged and continued in practice for forty-four years. In 1850 he purchased the rights of Lebanon County for "Coad's Patent Graduated Galvanic Battery," and thereafter confined his practice almost exclusively to chronic diseases. While belonging to the old school, he largely used botanic remedies which, in earlier life, he himself gathered. He cultivated valerian in his garden, producing some of the finest, equalling if not excelling the English root in appearance and medical virtues. He was familiar with the medicinal plants growing in Lebanon and the adjoining counties, and with assistants spent several weeks every autumn in gathering and curing them. From these he made his tinctures, decoctions and extracts.
He was a faithful member of St. Mary's Roman Catholic Church, companionable, courteous and pleasant and greatly respected by all with whom he came in contact. He died December 4, 1879, aged sixty-nine years. Of a numerous family, two sons survived, one of whom, Dr. W.C.J. Smith, became a physician in St. Clair, Schuylkill County.
J.H.R.
From an account read before the Lebanon County Historical Society, October 19, 1900, by J.H. Redsecker.
Source: Howard A. Kelly. A Cyclopedia of American Medical Biography: Comprising the Lives of Eminent Deceased Physicians and Surgeons from 1610 to 1910, vol. 2. Philadelphia: W.B. Saunders Co., 1912, p. 393.
Contributed by: Nancy.