|
TREAT was the fourth son of the Rev. Dr. Selah B. Treat, one of the secretaries of
the American Board of Foreign Missions, and his wife, Abigail (Peters) Treat. He was born
at Newark, New Jersey, February 28, 1840. He fitted for college at the Boston Latin School,
and entered our Class at its formation in 1859. In college he joined the Alpha Delta Phi
fraternity; was a member of the 'Technian Literary Society, one of its secretaries in 1862,
and one of its vice-presidents in 1863; and prophet for Class Day exercises, July, 1863.
After leaving college with the Class in 1863, Treat studied medicine and was a
graduate of the Bellevue Hospital Medical College, New York City, in 1866. He was for a
short time during the Civil War assistant surgeon in the Third New York Volunteer Cavalry.
He saw some medical service in the New York Hospital the year after leaving the medical
school; also spent some time in the study of theology, and in 1867, under the auspices of the
missionary board of which his father was one of the secretaries, he went to China as a
missionary physician. After a term of service of more than six years, he returned, in 1874,
to his father's home in enfeebled health, but with the hope of regaining his strength and
resuming his work in China, in which he was greatly interested. However, before his
complete recovery his mother's health failed, and not long after his father died, and his duty
was plainly indicated. He devoted time and strength, the latter not fully regained, to the
care of his invalid mother. His own health was never reestablished. By 1880 he was rapidly
declining. In May of that year he went to the Adirondacks, and hope of recovery was
revived, but duty summoned him to his mother's bedside, with the result that his disease
flamed up afresh. He again sought the dry climate of the Adirondack plateau, but in June,
after a short row upon the lake at Lucerne, New York, he was seized with a hemorrhage of
the lungs and died the next morning, June 20, 1880. "So his life," writes his brother and
classmate, Charles, "was spent, though prematurely, as it seemed to our vision, yet brightly
and beautifully. He said little, but acted well his part, and when the end came it found him
ready and glad to go." He never married.
Source:
Class of Sixty-Three Williams College Fortieth Year Report, by
the Class Historian, Thomas Todd Printer, Boston, 1903
|
