Dr. Samuel Beale Jr.

While exploring another part of Sandwich, I came across this simple memorial to Dr. Samuel M. Beale Jr. The words on the plaque caught my attention: “Our Friend the Doctor.” I wanted to know what kind of physician would be remembered by an entire town in such personal terms.

Dr. Beale came to Sandwich in 1909 after the death of the town’s previous physician. For the next 56 years, until his death in 1965, he cared for people in Sandwich and the surrounding Cape Cod communities. For much of that time, he was essentially the area’s country doctor, working from early morning until late at night.

His practice was very different from medicine today. He made house calls throughout Sandwich, Bourne, Falmouth, Mashpee and Barnstable. He delivered babies. When someone needed hospitalization, he sometimes put the patient in his own automobile and drove them to Tobey Hospital in Wareham or Cape Cod Hospital in Hyannis

Payment was not always expected in cash. According to the Friends of the Sandwich Town Archives, Beale was reluctant to pursue people who could not afford his services and sometimes accepted goods instead. One man reportedly paid him one lobster for each baby he delivered. 

In 1914, he purchased a house at 164 Main Street, where he both lived and practiced for decades. Even when he reached 85 years old, Dr. Beale was reportedly still seeing as many as twenty patients a day. A letter he wrote in 1962, when he was 86½, confirms that he was still practicing and seeing 15 to 20 patients daily after more than sixty years in medicine. 

He was also involved in the life of the town beyond his medical practice. In the 1920s, for example, he chaired the building committee responsible for planning a new Sandwich school. Even today, the town maintains a Dr. Samuel Beale Jr. Fund, another indication that his name remained part of the community long after his death  Dr. Beale died in 1965 at the age of 89. The little memorial I photographed stands at the corner of Main Street and Beale Avenue, the street itself named for him.

What I like most about this memorial is its simplicity. It could have listed his accomplishments or the number of years he practiced medicine. Instead, Sandwich chose something much more personal. “Our Friend the Doctor.” After more than half a century of answering calls, delivering babies, making house visits and caring for generations of Sandwich families, perhaps that was the most fitting title they could have given him.