Within the past quarter of a century a disposition has grown up, both in the mercantile and the professional world, to drift into specialties. Many years ago the merchant carried goods, including groceries, hardware, dry-goods and drugs, but to-day you will find each line of these goods distinct and separate. Ordinarily the dry-goods merchant knows nothing of the shoe trade, and the successful hardware merchant would be entirely lost in a dry-goods or drug store. In times past, in our schools and colleges, one professor would teach four or five different branches, but in the changes of time these have all been separated, so that to each important branch of study, a professor especially trained for that department, is assigned. So in the practice of medicine, though not in so great a degree as in the business world, have specialists grown up for the treatment of special diseases, and it stands to reason, that one who has made a close study of a particular line of diseases, must better understand that disease than one who has attempted to master a knowledge of all.

We are led to the above reflections because of the fact that Dr. Peck makes a specialty of treating cancers and tumors. He has been actively engaged in the practice of medicine for twenty-four years. He is a native of the State of New York, where he was born in Green County, on the 9th of August, 1825. His parents were Tenant and Polly (Moore) Peck. His father was by occupation a farmer, and he moved to Stephenson County, Ill., about the year 1848, and settled in Florence Township, where the parents passed the remainder of their days. The father died March 21, 1866, aged eighty-four years, two months and seventeen days, having been born Jan. 4, 1782. The mother survived him, dying June 16, 1870, aged eighty-one years, eight months and twenty-one days, her birth taking place Sept. 25, 1788.

Dr. Peck grew to manhood in Greene County, N. Y., and was educated in the common schools of the neighborhood, after which he became the student of Profs. Foote & Swift, both of whom were very noted physicians in their day. With these parties he acquired a knowledge of medicine and of his specialties. In 1845 he came to Stephenson County, Ill., and engaged in the ministry of the Methodist Episcopal Church. He continued in the ministry until 1863, when he began the practice of medicine, making the cure of cancers and tumors a specialty, to which he has devoted his whole time. While engaged in the ministry in Loran, he was elected to the office of Pathmaster under peculiar circumstances. He had publicly declared that this was the only office he could be induced to hold. His fellow-citizens, more in jest than earnest, elected him to the position. He availed himself of his rights, and much to the discomfiture of those who elected him, secured an excellent road through a slough, where teams unnumbered had mired down during the years preceding his term of office. To accomplish this, much work, in fact all the road laws of the State would permit, was exacted of his constituency. The perfected road yet remains, a lasting monument to his incumbency in office.

Dr. Peck’s first wife, Elizabeth Peck, died Jan. 5, 1868, leaving four children, and he subsequently married again. Religiously, he is a member of the United Brethren Church.

Contributed by Carol Parrish - Portrait and Biographical Album of Stephenson County, Ill. (1888), p. 315-16