Arthur

Arthur Nichols was a highly regarded physician and the beloved patriarch of the Nichols family.

Arthur grew up in Boston’s North End, attending Boston Latin School and chiming the bells at Christ Church (the Old North Church). At Harvard College, Arthur spent a summer measuring the depths of the Concord River, a project that was managed by the Concord author and poet laureate Henry David Thoreau. At the height of the Civil War in 1863, Arthur made his first trip abroad to study anatomy in Paris at the celebrated medical school, the Ecole de Médecine. In 1864 he returned home and enrolled at Harvard Medical School, doing rounds at Massachusetts General Hospital.

In 1867, Arthur returned to Europe to study in Vienna and Berlin. He traveled the continent extensively and likely found company among other elite Bostonians who spent considerable time abroad absorbing European culture. While in Europe, Arthur practiced piano which he described in a letter to his mother as a “pleasant recreation.” It was at this time that he began courting Elizabeth Fisher Homer, sending her letters and small gifts from his journeys abroad.

In November of 1869, Arthur and Elizabeth married and settled into their first home in Roxbury, Massachusetts where Arthur began seeing patients. It was there that they had their three daughters, as well as a son, Sidney, who sadly died of diptheria in early childhood.

In 1885, Arthur purchased 55 Mount Vernon Street from his friend and colleague, John Collins Warren Jr., the son of the famous surgeon John Collins Warren (1778-1856). Arthur served as the summer physician in Rye Beach, New Hampshire, where the Nichols vacationed prior to purchasing a summer estate in Cornish, New Hampshire.

While Arthur Nichols held many wideranging interests, including training pigeons and vexillology (the study of flags), his primary passion throughout his life was handbell ringing, which he passed on to his daughter Margaret. In his later years, Arthur took great delight in his six grandchildren. One grandson remembered his grandfather sitting in his black Morris chair in the alcove of the dining room at the family’s summer estate in Cornish, New Hampshire, “cigar smoke wreathing his head.”

More on Arthur:

Madeline Webster, Before Beacon Hill: The Nichols Family in the Warren House, 1869-1885, Nichols House Museum: 2017. Download paper.