Doctor Stanley Stillman
was born in Sacramento on the 23rd of August. His father was Dr. J. D. B. Stillman with whom we are well acquainted. John Maxon Stillman, Professor of Chemistry at Stanford, to whom we have previously referred, was one of his three brothers all of whom had distinguished careers.

He attended the Boys' High School in San Francisco and then entered the University of California in the class of 1882. He did not graduate for at the end of his second year his strong-willed father took him out of school and put him in charge of the family vineyard in Redlands, California. After three years of pruning and cultivating grapevines; driving a four-horse team and ranching; he broke away and, much against his father's wishes, entered Cooper Medical College in 1887. He was a Student Assistant in Dr. Lane's Office, probably in 1888 and '89. He received his M. D. degree in 1889, the year that Emmet Rixford entered the College and during which their life-long friendship began.

When Dr. Stillman died in 1934, the San Francisco County Medical Society called upon Dr. Rixford to prepare an obituary:

I find it doubly hard to write of Stillman in any objective way, for I knew him intimately for more than forty years - nearly fifty. In fact, we grew up together professionally.

When, not long since, Dr. Leo Newmark wrote me asking for Stillman's address, saying that when one wishes to know about Castor, he naturally calls on Pollux, I could only reply that my relation with Stillman was not that of Pollux to Castor, but rather that of Chauvin to Napoleon; that I had followed him about for years with admiration and devotion comparable only to Chauvin's.

Stillman's nature was a complex of qualities not easily to find duplicated - proud, independent, critical, even irascible; yet kindly, sensitive as a woman. . . As a surgeon, he was not merely competent and skillful, but was gifted with an extraordinary human understanding, as honest, too, with himself as in his professional relations. . . .As a teacher, he had a great knack of painting word pictures which have become almost proverbial in his students' memories. His students adored him, even when savagely critical, as he sometimes was, for they could not but rise to his sterling honesty and his uncanny instinct which dictated his action and his words. (Trenchant qualities not unlike those of his father.). . . .

It is a pity that he contributed so little to the surgical literature, for with a mental makeup peculiar to himself he could have reached a far wider audience than that of the classroom, and his message would have been worth while.

In 1893, both Stillman and Rixford were appointed as Adjuncts to the Chair of Surgery. In 1898, both were promoted to the rank of Professor of Surgery. In 1909, Stanford University organized its medical faculty and Stillman was made Professor of Surgery and Executive Head of the Surgical Department. He continued in that position until 1926 when he reached the age of sixty-five and retired in accordance with University policy. When he died of bronchial pneumonia on 13 October 1934, it was written that "California's best beloved surgeon has gone."

Elizabeth Lane Stillman
Born: 6 May 1900
Place: San Francisco, CA
Lived: 1934
Place: San Francisco, CA
Married: Russell Andeson Mackey
Born: 3 Sep 1889
Place: San Francisco, CA
Died: 18 Jan 1964
Place:
Date Married: 26 Nov 1925

Stanley Stillman, Jr.
Born: 10 Jul 1903
Place: San Francisco, CA
Died: 3 May 1939
Place: Portland, OR
Married: Lucy Wilkinson Anderson
Born: Aug 1902
Place:
Died: 3 Jan 1983
Place:
Date Married: 26 Jun 1928