H. I. (Henry Ingersoll) Bowditch (1808-1892) was born in Salem, Massachusetts, and died in Boston, Massachusetts. He graduated from Harvard University (1828) and Harvard Medical School (1832) and then practiced at Massachusetts General Hospital and Boston City Hospital. In 1835, after witnessing a mob attack on William Lloyd Garrison, Bowditch became a radical abolitionist, organizing the Anti-Man-Hunting League to apprehend slave-hunters. After Bowditch's passing, Frederick Douglass remarked that "He was the first in Boston, to treat me as a man."

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