Our story begins at eleven o'clock in the morning on July 17, 1866, when 24 Cumberland County physicians arrived at the Court House in Carlisle. This was the largest gathering of physicians in the county up to that time and, in addition to seven doctors from Carlisle, included practitioners from Shippensburg, Newville, Mechanicsburg, New Cumberland, West Fairview, and a number of other smaller points in the county.
Robert Lowry Sibbet, a physician of Carlisle in the last third of the nineteenth century, once described himself, somewhat deprecatingly, as not associated with any medical school or connected with any medical journal, not a military or naval surgeon, not a specialist.
It is indeed an Unalloyed pleasure to have the privilege of appearing before the Hamilton Library Association this evening to turn back to the period when I first became a resident of Cumberland County. Although forty years have elapsed since that period, and fifteen years have passed since I removed from your midst, I am sincere when I state that nowhere else have I made and retained better and warmer friends than those I left in the Cumberland Valley. There is something in your charming landscape. In your beautiful scenery and in your romantic history embalmed "In Old Bellaire" and its setting that must be the secret you have in retaining the affection and esteem of those who have been residents in your midst.