Doctors Edwin Gillard, Sr. and Jr.

The pencil sketch pictured above was done by Edwin Eugene Gillard in 1889 at around age 16, when he was a student in the Sandusky Public Schools. The son of Dr. Edwin and Ida (Stroud) Gillard, Edwin Eugene Gillard also became a physician. In the 1917 Sandusky City Directory, father and son, both named Dr. Edwin Gillard, shared a medical practice in Sandusky at 503 West Washington Street. Sadly, the elder Dr. Edwin Gillard died in 1917, and the younger Dr. Edwin Gillard died in 1918, at the age of 43.

This photograph of the elder Dr. Edwin Gillard was taken by Sandusky photographer Willard A. Bishop.

The elder Edwin Gillard was born in Venice, Ohio (now the western end of Sandusky) in 1845. He graduated from the Cleveland Homeopathic College in 1872. Dr. Gillard was a physician in Sandusky for many years, and served as Erie County Coroner from 1879 through 1881. Dr. Gillard married Miss Ida Stroud in 1869; her father was area dentist Dr. Charles Stroud. They were the parents of three children, Cora, Edwin, and John Gillard.

In 1884, Dr. Gillard opened the Electro-Medical and Surgical Sanitarium on Washington Street. The January 1, 1884 issue of the Sandusky Daily Register describes the Sanitarium in detail. 

The Sanitarium was “made as complete in all the appointments for a Sanitarium as money and skill could effect.”  Each room and hallway was heated with steam, and the floors were insulated from noise by layers of concrete. The facility featured an electro-thermal bath, and the “Holtz Toepler” electric machine for administering electrotherapeutic treatment for nervous diseases, rheumatism, and neuralgia.

The Electro-Medical and Surgical Sanitarium ceased operating in 1886, though Dr. Gillard continued his practice as a physician. On October 2. 1912, the New York Times featured an article about the doctor and his brave efforts to treat Mrs. Charles Barney, the daughter of Jay Cooke. Dr. Gillard and Mr. C. B. Lockwood took a small motor boat to Gibraltar Island during gale winds. Mrs. Barney did indeed recover. 

In 1896, the building at 609 West Washington Street served as the Lake Erie Sanitarium, and later it was occupied by a boarding house. Helen Hansen tells us in the book At Home in Early Sandusky that for many years the building was known as “The Gillard Hotel.”