Stuart, Charles A.

Charles Arthur Stuart (1893-1962), professor of biology, was born in Lyon Mountain in northern New York on May 26, 1893. He entered Brown in 1914, childhood illness making him a little older than the usual freshman. He became interested in bacteriology after striking up an acquaintance through the basement window of Arnold Lab with Percy Meader 1914, who worked there evenings as a graduate student of bacteriologist Frederic P. Gorham and invited Stuart to join him. After World War I service with the Brown University unit of the United States Ambulance Corps, Stuart returned to graduate in 1919 as a member of the class of 1918. He stayed on to receive his master of science degree in 1919 and his Ph.D. in 1923. Appointed instructor in 1923, he was promoted to assistant professor in 1925, associate professor in 1931, and professor in 1944. In 1949 he was named the Robert P. Brown Professor of Biology. Beginning in 1925, he also gave lectures in bacteriology and immunology at the Rhode Island Hospital School of Nursing. He was consulting bacteriologist to the Charles V. Chapin Hospital and the Veterans Administration Hospital, and also chairman of the Rhode Island State Board of Basic Science Examiners. His research was related to infectious mononucleosis and the enteric bacteria. His vocation was also his avocation. He spent most of his time in the laboratory and his wife assisted him in keeping experimental records. The laboratory in the basement of Arnold Laboratory, to which he had advanced after his first assignment to the penthouse on top of the building, was his home for the rest of his career. By choice he remained in the basement, where the traffic passed him by and it was cool in the summer. He continued to work there after his retirement in 1960. He died on October 17, 1962 in Providence. His student Samuel B. Formal ’45, writing with Staley Falkow in the Journal of Bacteriology, reminisced about Stuart’s work:

“He made his own media, washed his own glassware, and maintained his own cultures. He shunned technical assistants, and when he required help, Mrs. Stuart was always nearby. ... He was adored by his students and was known to all of them simply as ‘Doc.’”