Jacob Davis Babcock Stillman (1819–1888) was personal physician to Leland Stanford, the eighth governor of California.
Born 1819 in Schenectady, New York Jacob Davis Babcock Stillman, the son of Joseph Stillman II and Elizabeth Maxson, better known as JDB, was the namesake of Jacob D.Babcock of Ashaway, R.I. JDB migrated to California in 1849 and made a name not only as a physician but also as an adventurist, writer and a pioneer in the medical field.
[citation needed] Following his graduation in botany and biology in 1843 from the Union University in Schenectady, the third in the United States at the time, JDB worked as a director in a boarding and later as a surgeon at the Bellevue Hospital Center.
During his tenure at the hospital, he set off at age thirty on a 194-day ship journey on the Pacific Ocean for San Francisco via Cape Horn.
[2] After the death of his first wife, JDB remarried Mary Gavitt Wells of Westerly, Rhode Island, and continued his medical practice in New York.