Title: Homeopathic physician, professor, editor
Birthdate: April 6, 1836
Death Date: January 15, 1883
Plot Location: Section 1, Lot 71, southeast corner

“Healing the sick” was sometimes more luck than science in the mid-19th century. Robert grew up in a time and place where an alternative to “traditional” medicine known as homeopathy was taking root. It was later proven ineffective, but it briefly gained adherents before science revealed that infectious diseases were caused by viruses, bacteria, fungi, and parasites.
His life’s journey began with a family that included an older brother, two sisters, and his parents, Robert and Mary. They lived in the Moyamensing District of the county of Philadelphia. That area didn’t become part of the city until 1854 and is now known as the Grays Ferry, Southwest Center City, and Point Breeze neighborhoods.
Until he was 13, Robert was educated at Nazareth Hall, a boarding school run by the Moravian Church in Nazareth, Pennsylvania, north of Allentown. A few years after returning home, he decided to study medicine at the Homeopathic Medical College of Pennsylvania, the first such school in the country.
While he was a student there, he married Mary Milner, a Moyamensing maiden. According to the dates on the family tombstone shown above, Mary was just 16 and Robert was 18 when their first child, Harriet, was born in 1854. Robert graduated in 1856 and set up his practice in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, not far from Nazareth.
That’s where two more children were born: Mary (1860-1884) and Wellington (1863-1866). Mary died from tuberculosis at the Pennsylvania Institution for Feeble-Minded Children in Elwyn, Delaware County. Wellington died of cholera, a bacterial infection. The McClatcheys moved back to Philadelphia shortly after Wellington was born, so he was the first to be buried at Mount Moriah.
Over the next 20 years, Robert established a name for himself as a practitioner, but he was also drawn back to his alma mater to teach. In 1865 he occupied the chair of anatomy; two years later he became professor of “Pathology and Practice of Medicine” until the time of his death.
The college changed its name to Hahnemann Medical College of Philadelphia in 1869 to recognize the founder of homeopathy. Robert authored the textbook, McClatchey’s Domestic Practice, and for ten years he edited the Hahnemanian Monthly. During this time a biographer noted that Robert “exerted a marked influence on his profession on account of the vigor and force of his writings, and his wide knowledge of medical literature.”
One more daughter, Isabel, was born in 1870. Five years later, Robert’s wife died of heart disease at age 37. Harriet was then in her 20s so she assumed the role of mother to her youngest sister.
His love for children influenced him to become an incorporating board member of a children’s hospital. He then served on the first board of directors of Philadelphia Children’s Homeopathic Hospital, but would not live to see it open its doors in 1896. It would later be named St. Luke’s and Children’s Medical Center. (The first hospital for children in the country was Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, founded in 1855.)
It was a shock to his family, friends, and co-workers when Robert suffered a stroke at age 46 and died on January 15, 1883. The 20 years he gave to his profession in his hometown were brief yet impactful. He joined his wife and son, as would his three daughters, in Section 1.
For more information about Philadelphia’s men of homeopathic medicine, see the Notable life story of Vanroom Robin Tindall, M.D.

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