Professor Pitman and Wife Poisoned:  A terrible, heart-breaking tragedy has occurred to one of our citizens and family, throwing a wide circle of relatives and devoted friends into the pangs of unmitigated sorrow and grief.

The details, as learned by your correspondent, were as follows:  Prof Miles Pitman, at present resides in Milton, where he is engaged in teaching.  Last Friday, feeling the need of medical treatment of self and wife, he called at the drug store for a vial of calomel, which he was experienced in administering in his own family without medical advice.  The druggist informed him that he had calomel only in bulk but "just as good."  "That will do", said the Professor, "providing it is calomel".  On his arrival home, he found that Mrs Pitman had not returned from the opera which she had attended that evening.  Measuring out the usual dose, Mr Pitman swallowed his medicine and lay down awhile.  But soon he began to get sick and sicker until by time his wife returned he was a sick man.  Still he was not alarmed, but thought he must have been very bilious, and the calomel was making him ill.  Mrs Pitman also took a dose of the same medicine when she cam home and retired to her room.  Pretty soon Mr Pitman heard his wife calling and on going to her room found her in spasms.  Hastening back to his room to dress, when he returned to his wife, and as he entered the room he fell on the floor unconscious.  A doctor was hastily summoned and another also.  Fortunately, Mr Pitman's stomach yielded to powerful emetics and his life was saved by a narrow margin, but the unfortunate wife and mother could not be saved and death mercifully closed the heart-breaking scene, one terrible spasm after another until death.

The doctors appropriate the package of medicine, said to be calomel, but which has inflicted a terrible blow not only on the heart-broken husband and children, but also father, mother, brothers and sisters and a wide circle of relatives and devoted friends.  Mrs Pitman was the daughter of Mr Chas Douglass and wife, citizens of Westville.  She leaves four little children to mourn their irreparable loss.

SOURCE:  Holmes County Advertiser, Bonifay FL, Saturday, 18 Mar 1911; transcribed by Cathy Strickland Popp