Melville Madison Bigelow

Melville Madison Bigelow (August 2, 1846 – May 4, 1921) was an American legal academic who wrote influential books and papers on legal history, and served as dean of Boston University School of Law from 1902 to 1911. While teaching at Boston University, Bigelow completed a Ph.D. in history at Harvard University in 1879. Elizabeth died in 1881, and in 1883, Bigelow married Cornelia Frothingham Read, who died in 1892. He subsequently married Alice Bradford Woburn in 1898.

All three of Bigelow's children predeceased him. His daughters Ada and Charlotte died in childhood a month apart in 1876, while his son Leslie died of pneumonia in 1896, while a law student. Bigelow maintained close friendships with other legal scholars, including Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., and when Leslie died, Holmes wrote a moving letter of condolence.

Bigelow died at Corey Hill Hospital in Brookline, Massachusetts, after an illness of several weeks, at the age of 74.