Kate M. Dilley
MRS. KATE M. DILLEY. The able and honored proprietor of the Dilley Sanitarium, in the City of Wichita, has proved herself one of the vigorous and resourceful business women of the Sunflower State and by the establishing and maintaining of her excellent sanitarium she has made a noble contribution to the list of valuable medical institutions in the City of Wichita.
Mrs. Dilley was born in Manchester, England. When she was a child of two years her parents removed to Cape Town, South Africa, and in that far distant land Mrs. Dilley passed the period of her girlhood and early youth. She profited duly by the advantages afforded in the excellent schools of Cape Town and finally entered Union College at that place, an institution in which she was graduated as a member of the class of 1895. She next entered Claremont Sanitarium, a splendidly equipped institution at Claremont, South Africa, and in the same she was graduated as a trained nurse, in the year 1898. In the following year she was graduated as a midwife, in the Free Dispensary at Cape Town. In the year that marked her graduation in Claremont Sanitarium she opened a Turkish bath establishment at Cape Town, and this she conducted with marked success for the ensuing ten years. In 1901 was solemnized her marriage, at Cape Town, to O. D. Dilley, an American missionary nurse, and the three children of this union, all born at Cape Town, are Almira, Harlan and Aileen.
In 1908, accompanied by her children, Mrs. Dilley left South Africa and came to the United States. Within a short time after her arrival in America she came to Wichita and established the Dilley Sanitarium, which she has since successfully conducted along the general lines that mark the hygienic and definite technical system of treatment that have given international fame to the celebrated Battle Creek Sanitarium, at Battle Creek, Michigan. Mrs. Dilley is a woman of high professional attainments and much executive ability, so that the success of her enterprise at Wichita has been a natural result. Her sanitarium is eligibly situated at 111 South St. Francis Avenue.
Transcribed from volume 4, page 1835 of A Standard History of Kansas and Kansans, written and compiled by William E. Connelley, Secretary of the Kansas State Historical Society, Topeka. Chicago: Lewis Publishing Company, copyright 1918; originally transcribed 1998, modified 2003 by Carolyn Ward.