We are indebted to the honored profession our subject represents for great good to the world and innumerable blessings to human kind. With its modern discoveries the ravages of disease have been mitigated, surgery has given us a new lease on life and the contagions which once swept us into eternity have become as harmless as the air we breathe. The practice of medicine in this age consists in humanely aiding nature to throw off our afflictions and restore normal conditions without resort to the brutalities of the dark ages or the superstitions of our forefathers of the centuries just passed. While diseases seem to have multiplied and their virulence sometimes increased, science has placed medicine in control, and the physician of today as compared with the physician of the blood-letting era of the eighteenth century is as daylight compared to the darkness of night.
With the present enlightened age Nature has decreed that Dr. Wade shall be associated. The journey from the farm to the physician’s chair included a season of professional reading with Dr. Irwin, of Patonville, Texas, a course of lectures in the Missouri Medical College at St. Louis and a finishing course in the University of Tennessee at Nashville. While he engaged in the practice at times on his way toward a full-fledged member of the cult, he entered the work in all seriousness at Bagota, Texas, in 1890, at once upon completing his course. For seven years he administered to the wants and needs of the distressed and physically afflicted at Bagota, when a relaxation of his bodily vigor forced him to seek a different climate and he located in Jacksboro in 1896. In Jack county he doctor&39;s personality and his professional attainments drew him into a gratifying practice and his familiar countenance is known in many homes at every point of the compass, even beyond the limits of his county. To better fit him for his calling, in 1898 and in 1900, he took post graduate work in the Chicago Polyclinic, and in 1902 at the Polyclinic at New Orleans. He is local surgeon for the Rock Island Railroad, and for eight years was health officer and physician for Jack county, resigning and recommending his successor in 1905.
Dr. Wade was born in Person county, North Carolina, June 15, 1864. His family was one of the old ones of the Tar Heel state and his father, Richard A. Wade, and his mother, Maggie Adams, were born in the same county with himself. The Wades and Adams were agricultural people, and in 1870 Richard and Maggie Ward brought their family to Texas and located in Lamar county, where they continued farming and died, the former in 1893 at seventy-five years of age, and the latter in 1897, at seventy-four years of age. Of their children, Sallie married George B. Bolton and Martha became the wife of J. C. Bolton, both of Lamar county; John A. is a farmer in Coleman county, Texas; Mary died as the first wife of J. C. Bolton, before named; Ab B., of Delta county; Richard H. died in Lamar county; and Maggie, who married John Howard and resides in Coleman county, Texas.
The rural schools provided Dr. Wade with his elementary education and he quit the farm at twenty-three years of age and took up medicine studies in preparation for his life work. After he located in Jacksboro he returned to Lamar county and married, January 7, 1897, Miss Jennie Bentley, a daughter of E. R. Bentley, who settled in Lamar county from Arkansas. Mrs. Wade was born in Lamar county, Texas, as was her mother, Mary E., a daughter of Dr. Burris. George Bentley is Dr. and Mrs. Wade’s only child.
Aside from his professional duties Dr. Wade has given some attention to rural pursuits in Jack county, having a farm of more than a half section and owning in addition a section and a half in Crosby county. He is examiner for some of the strong insurance societies and for the Woodmen and is Entered Apprentice in Masonry.
Source: B. B. Paddock, History and Biographical Record of North and West Texas (Chicago: Lewis Publishing Co., 1906), Vol. II, pp. 338-339.
[Return to introduction]