Dr Henry Clay Lewis

from https://www.isjl.org/mississippi-yazoo-city-encyclopedia.html

Henry Clay Lewis was born June 26, 1825, in Charleston, South Carolina as the seventh child of David and Rachel Salomon Lewis, French and Italian Jews. Eventually, he came to Yazoo City to stay with brother, Joseph, and attend school. His brother went bankrupt in 1837, and to support himself financially, Henry began working in the cotton fields. When he turned 16, he apprenticed with a local doctor named Washington Dorey. He moved to Louisville, Kentucky to enter Louisville Medical College in 1844. Following his graduation, he moved to Louisiana to practice medicine in Madison Parish on the Tensas River. He eventually produced popular literary sketches based on his life in the Louisiana frontier. The sketches followed a young swamp doctor named Madison Tensas, and several were published under the pseudonym "Madison Tensas" in New York's Spirit of the Times. Three years later, Lewis moved to Richmond, Louisiana, where he expanded his practice and wrote his only book, Odd Leaves from the Life of a Louisiana Swamp Doctor. Lewis drowned at twenty-five, while crossing a flooded river in order to tend to cholera patients.