Grounds of VA Hospital, 5000 W. National Ave., Milwaukee, Milwaukee County 

Dr. Erastus B. Wolcott was an originator of the idea for a national soldiers' home in Milwaukee. A spirited leader in medicine, business, and government, he was state surgeon general during the Civil War and an ardent advocate for what is now the Veterans Administration Hospital at Wood. The hospital was established in 1867, and Dr. Wolcott was appointed by Congress to the national governing board. Dr. Wolcott was a founder of the State Medical Society in 1841 and the Medical Society of Milwaukee County in 1846. He made surgical history in 1861 as the first physi­cian to remove a diseased kidney. In 1869 he married Dr. Laura J. Ross, the first woman admitted to a medical society in Wisconsin and one of the first three American woman physicians. She erected the monument to Dr. Wolcott in Milwaukee's Lake Park.

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[Source: McBride, Sarah Davis. History Just Ahead (Madison:WHS, 1999).]