Professor of pathology at the University of California Medical School, Dr. Douglas W. Montgomery was appointed as the first Professor of Dermatology in 1892. He was born in Ontario, Canada, of Scotch and Welsh parents and attended the Toronto School of Medicine and the Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons from which he received his medical degree in 1882.  After a residency in New York hospitals, he spent three years in Europe working under masters such as Dr. Thoma and Dr. Ehrlich.  He studied in Italy, Heidelberg, Wurzberg, Vienna, Switzerland, London, and Edinburgh.  He was chiefly interested during his early medical life in pathology and its new branch, bacteriology.

He apparently came to San Francisco on a pleasure trip in May, 1886, and decided to remain.  Dr. Montgomery became Professor of Pathology at the University of California Medical School in 1888, and in 1892 was also elected president of the San Francisco Medical Society. Six years later he became president of the California Academy of Medicine in 1898.  Dr. Montgomery resided at 1301 Van Ness Avenue, which was the northwest corner of that avenue and Sutter Street. Since his friend, orthopedic surgeon Dr. Harry Sherman lived next to Dr. Montgomery, the cornner was dubbed "Skin and bones corner."

In 1895, he was elected  a member of American Dermatological Association, and served as Vice President (1900-1901) and President (1910-1911) of the society. He published 135 articles on skin and syphilitic diseases; many of these were in collaboration with Dr. George W. Culver who practised with Dr. Montgomery at 450 Sutter Street. One of important contribution was discovery and demonstration of the sebaceous glands in the mouth with Dr. W.G. Hay.

In 1900, his knowledge of pathology brought him to play a special role in the history of bubonic plague in San Francisco.  Dr. Montgomery studied with officers of the US Public Health Service autopsy material from a chinese man with swollen lymph nodes.  They concurred in the suspicion of bubonic plague, confirming the diagnosis by transmittal of the disease to a rat, two guinea pigs, and a monkey.

In the History of the San Francisco Medical Society, Drs. J. Marion Read and Mary E. Mathes commented following: In appearance, Douglass Montgomery was short and slight of build, with a ruddy complexion and bushy eyebrows.  What he lacked in stature he made up in personality.  He was  very friendly,  which was reflected in a natural, cordial manner.  When meeting him for the first time and talking with him for a few minutes, one had a feeling that they had known him a long time and had a delightful acquaintance.  He had a wining smile and a contagious, hearty laugh, and he delighted in telling anecdotes of persons he had known and of situations he or his friends had experienced.  He seemed to have an inexhaustible store of amusing stories he loved to relate, usually to drive home some point he wished to make.  This candor and friendliness were born of an inborn interest in people.  He was quite sincere in his reply when once asked what his favorite amusement was; his answer, "Observing my fellow beings." On the occasion of a special honor conferred on Dr. Montgomery by the San Francisco Medical Society, celebrating 50 years of his practice, he stated on December 14, 1937, that he had seen the equipage, dress, and demeanor of medical men change.  The automobile displaced the doctor's carriage, his most striking equipment.  He remembered Dr. Von Hoffman's beautiful coach with his coachman in a livery upon box, driving a span of prize horses: McNutt with his tall, white hat of striking shape, seated in his carriage and accompanied by his spotted coach dogs, Dr. Parson's austerely seated in his lofty carriage, dressed in his London-tailored clothes, and Dr. J.H. Stallard, another Englishman, who drove a handsome resembling an upright coffin.  Dr. Stallard was one of the sights of the town, with his white, flowing side whiskers, his black frock coat, his stove-pipe hat, and his saucy lap dogs seated beside him, driving forth in his peculiar showcase.

Dr. Montgomery  was an enthusiastic and indefatigable traveler, and he wrote charmingly of his experiences in foreign countries using his excellent knowledge of ancient and foreign languages. While traveling in Brazil in 1910, he learned of Dr. Paul Ehrlich's discovery of Salvarsan.  He sailed at once for Europe, saw Ehrlich, and forwarded to the University of California Medical School the first box of "606 ampoules" to be used in the United States.  It was in this same year that he was elected President of the American Dermatological Association, and his Presidential Address dealt largely with the use of Salvarsan and the treatment of syphilis.  His private practice soon resembled more that of a neurologist than a dermatologist, and his influence was so great in this direction in the American Dermatological Association that Pusey complained of it.

Dr. Montgomery and his wife boarded one of the first commercial aircrafts known as Clippers in the early 1930's and went to the Orient, then went up the Yangtze River in a single motored plane with a Chinese pilot, and then returned on a Clipper after exploring other parts of inland China in the same precarious manner.  It was on a similar trip to South America that this keen and likable gentleman died in a pleasant little hotel in Guayaquil, Ecuador, on December 21, 1941, of myocardial infarction.