Some more information on the rather interesting Dr. Arthur Edward Peticolas (1824- Nov 27 1868) He was the grandson of Phillipe Abraham Peticolas born March 1760 Meziers, France came to American by way of Santo Domingo. His parents were Edward F. Peticolas(b 1793 Pa) and Jane Pitfield Braddick, both of artistic leanings, Edward F. Peticolas being one of the most well known painters of the Virginia of the time; young Arthur E. Peticolas displayed some canvases himself as a young man before turning to medicine.*
He received his medical education in the Medical Department of Hampden-Sidney College, (now the Medical College of Virginia), where he graduated in March, 1849.
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In the autumn of 1854, the professor of anatomy, Dr. Johnson, having met his death by the loss of the steamer Arctic, on which he was returning from Europe, Dr. Peticolas was appointed by the faculty to deliver the lectures in that department, during the ensuing winter course, and in the following March, he was duly elected by the board of visitors to the vacant professorship.
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At the commencement of the war, he received a commission as surgeon in the army of the Confederate States, and was soon after assigned to duty as a member of the board established at Richmond for the examination of surgeons and assistant surgeons, in which position he remained until the termination of hostilities.
The increasing inroads of his relentless disease upon his strength and spirits drove him at length to seek relief in a change of climate, and, with this view, he accepted, in the summer of 1867, the offer of the chair of anatomy in the New Orleans School of Medicine, and bade adieu to the Institution with which, in various relations, he had been so long connected. His hopes of amendment, however, were doomed to disappointment, and he resigned his position in New Orleans at the close of his first course. Returning to Richmond, he resumed the practice of his profession, and about one year ago, without solicitation on his part, he was elected superintendent of the Eastern Lunatic Asylum, at Williamsburg.
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While bodily suffering and mental anxiety threw a tinge of melancholy over his character and imparted to his manners a habitual reserve which was unattractive to the stranger, the sincerity and real kindliness of his nature won for him the cordial esteem and affection of those who knew him most intimately.
The article below is rather more . . . direct . . . about the end of Dr. Peticolas.
Dr Arthur E Peticolas.
Dr Arthur E Peticolas, Superintendent the Eastern Lunatic Asylum at Williamsburg, committed suicide there on the morning of Nov. 28th, by leaping from a window of the building, and dashing out his brains. He was a distinguished physician, and formerly a professor the medical college at Richmond. His mind been unsettled for some time past.
-The Medical and Surgical Reporter, Philadelphia, Oct. 17, 1868
*"Talented Virginians: The Peticolas Family"-L. Moody Simms, Jr.
The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography Vol. 85, No. 1 (Jan., 1977),
