Peter Charles Remondino (1846-1926)

Peter Charles Remondino, a graduate of the Jefferson Medical College of Philadelphia, was one of San Diego’s most active and well-known physicians during the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Only two years after his arrival in 1873 he was appointed city physician. Several years later he was appointed the first president of the San Diego Board of Health. He was also a member of the American Medical Association. In the early 1880s he and Dr. Thomas Stockton opened up San Diego’s first private hospital. Dr. Remondino married Sophia Ann Earle, a niece of the Bishop of Marlborough Alfred Earle, in 1877.

Dr. Remondino was probably best known for his writing and editorial accomplishments. From 1892 to 1896 he published the National Popular Review out of San Diego. Within the journal he wrote and edited many articles promoting the healthful properties of the San Diego climate and advising invalids with pulmonary consumption (tuberculosis) to come to San Diego. He also wrote several books and many medical journal articles promoting the healthful climate of San Diego. Among these books were The Modern Climatic Treatment of Invalids with Pulmonary Consumption in Southern California(1893) and The Mediterranean Shores of America (1892).

Dr. Remondino’s enthusiasm about the healthfulness of the San Diego climate was not surprising, considering that he had himself been cured from chronic malarial fever within a few years after arriving in the area. He had contracted the disease while working as a surgeon at Ft. Monroe Virginia during the Civil War. After the war he returned to his home in Minnesota, yet after a short time he had lost a great amount of weight, having been constantly tormented by the malarial fevers. He was almost to the point of death when he desperately began to read much of the literature then available about health and climate. Lured by the many descriptions of Southern California’s healthful "miasma free" air, Remondino decided in 1873 to come to San Diego.

Remondino was born in Turin in 1846. It was then part of the Piedmont area of the Kingdom of Sardinia. He wanted to be a doctor from the time he was very young, having come from a family of distinguished doctors and anatomists, going back to the fourteenth century. At the age of eight he came with his father to America and settled in Minnesota. His father had a large library and the young Remondino was constantly reading to satisfy his appetite for knowledge. Looking back on his motivation for becoming a doctor he wrote:

Having always from an early youth possessed the predilection for all subjects belonging to natural and general history as these apply to all animated nature, it was but natural to drift into medicine. Medicine from the great breadth of its domain and range of its functions, cover [sic] about everything worth studying in life.

He went on to a most extraordinary and colorful medical career that encompassed fifty-five years, from the time of his enrollment in Jefferson Medical College in 1863 to his retirement in San Diego in the 1920s. He served as surgeon during the American Civil War and also the Franco-Prussian War, during which he was given a medal by the French Government for his services.

After his retirement Dr. Remondino began to write the memoirs of his fascinating life. Unfortunately he was not able to finish the work before his death. Yet nearly a thousand pages of various drafts of his memoirs can be found in the Remondino Manuscript Collection in the San Diego History Center’s Research Archives. These descriptions of Dr. Remondino's incredibly rich life offer an excellent source for anyone interested in late nineteenth-century medicine and medical climatology.

Dr. Remondino died December 10, 1926.

See Dr. Remondino's autobiography, a transcript of an original document on file at the San Diego History Center, Dr. P.C. Remondino Papers, MS-4.

[contributed by Dennis Sharp, Assistant Archivist, San Diego Historical Society]