“James Oliver. This Book Begun Aug. 12, 1685.” It is a rough sort of
account-book, containing among other things prescriptions for patients,
and charges for the same, with counter-charges for the purchase of
medicines and other matters. Dr. Oliver practised in Cambridge, where
may be seen his tomb with inscriptions, and with sculptured figures that
look more like Diana of the Ephesians, as given in Calmet's Dictionary,
than like any angels admitted into good society here or elsewhere.
I do not find any particular record of what his patients suffered from,
but I have carefully copied out the remedies he mentions, and find
that they form a very respectable catalogue. Besides the usual simples,
elder, parsley, fennel, saffron, snake-root, wormwood, I find the Elixir
Proprietatis, with other elixire and cordials, as if he rather fancied
warming medicines; but he called in the aid of some of the more
energetic remedies, including iron, and probably mercury, as he bought
two pounds of it at one time.
The most interesting item is his bill against the estate of Samuel
Pason of Roxbury, for services during his last illness. He attended this
gentleman,--for such he must have been, by the amount of physic which he
took, and which his heirs paid for,--from June 4th, 1696, to September
3d of the same year, three months. I observe he charges for visits as
well as for medicines, which is not the case in most of his bills. He
opens the attack with a carminative appeal to the visceral conscience,
and follows it up with good hard-hitting remedies for dropsy,--as I
suppose the disease would have been called,--and finishes off with a
rallying dose of hartshorn and iron.
It is a source of honest pride to his descendant that his bill, which
was honestly paid, as it seems to have been honorably earned, amounted
to the handsome total of seven pounds and two shillings. Let me add that
he repeatedly prescribes plaster, one of which was very probably the
“Dr. Oliver” that soothed my infant griefs, and for which I blush to say
that my venerated ancestor received from Goodman Hancock the painfully
exiguous sum of no pounds, no shillings, and sixpence.
I have illustrated the practice of the first century, from the two
manuscripts I have examined, as giving an impartial idea of its
every-day methods. The Governor, Johannes Secundus, it is fair to
remember, was an amateur practitioner, while my ancestor was a professed
physician. Comparing their modes of treatment with the many scientific
follies still prevailing in the Old World, and still more with the
extraordinary theological superstitions of the community in which they
lived, we shall find reason, I think, to consider the art of healing
as in a comparatively creditable state during the first century of New
England.
In addition to the evidence as to methods of treatment furnished by the
manuscripts I have cited, I subjoin the following document, to which
my attention was called by Dr. Shurtleff, our present Mayor. This is a
letter of which the original is to be found in vol. lxix. page 10 of the
“Archives” preserved at the State House in Boston. It will be seen
that what the surgeon wanted consisted chiefly of opiates, stimulants,
cathartics, plasters, and materials for bandages. The complex and varied
formulae have given place to simpler and often more effective forms of
the same remedies; but the list and the manner in which it is made out
are proofs of the good sense and schooling of the surgeon, who, it may
be noted, was in such haste that he neglected all his stops. He might
well be in a hurry, as on the very day upon which he wrote, a great
body of Indians--supposed to be six or seven hundred--appeared before
Hatfield; and twenty-five resolute young men of Hadley, from which town
he wrote, crossed the river and drove them away.
HADLY May 30: 76
Mr RAWSON Sr
What we have recd by Tho: Houey the past month is not the chiefest of
our wants as you have love for poor wounded I pray let us not want for
these following medicines if you have not a speedy conveyance of them I
pray send on purpose they are those things mentioned in my former letter
but to prevent future mistakes I have wrote them att large wee have
great want with the greatest halt and speed let us be supplyed. Sr Yr
Sert WILL LOCHS.
(Endorsed)
Mr. Lockes Letter Recd from the Governor 13 Jane & acquainted ye Council
with it but could not obtaine any thing to be sent in answer thereto. 13
June 1676.
I have given some idea of the chief remedies used by our earlier
physicians, which were both Galenic and chemical; that is, vegetable and
mineral. They, of course, employed the usual perturbing medicines
which Montaigne says are the chief reliance of their craft. There were,
doubtless, individual practitioners who employed special remedies with
exceptional boldness and perhaps success. Mr. Eliot is spoken of, in
a letter of William Leete to Winthrop, Junior, as being under Mr.
Greenland's mercurial administrations. The latter was probably enough
one of these specialists.
There is another class of remedies which appears to have been employed
occasionally, but, on the whole, is so little prominent as to imply a
good deal of common sense among the medical practitioners, as compared
with the superstitions prevailing around them. I have said that I have
caught the good Governor, now and then, prescribing the electuary of
millipedes; but he is entirely excused by the almost incredible fact
that they were retained in the materia medica so late as when Rees's
Cyclopaedia was published, and we there find the directions formerly
given by the College of Edinburgh for their preparation. Once or twice
we have found him admitting still more objectionable articles into his
materia medica; in doing which, I am sorry to say that he could
plead grave and learned authority. But these instances are very rare
exceptions in a medical practice of many years, which is, on the whole,
very respectable, considering the time and circumstances.
Some remedies of questionable though not odious character appear
occasionally to have been employed by the early practitioners, but they
were such as still had the support of the medical profession. Governor
John Winthrop, the first, sends for East Indian bezoar, with other
commodities he is writing for. Governor Endicott sends him one he had of
Mr. Humfrey. I hope it was genuine, for they cheated infamously in
the matter of this concretion, which ought to come out of an animal's
stomach, but the real history of which resembles what is sometimes told
of modern sausages.
There is a famous law-case of James the First's time, in which a
goldsmith sold a hundred pounds' worth of what he called bezoar, which
was proved to be false, and the purchaser got a verdict against him.
Governor Endicott also sends Winthrop a unicorn's horn, which was the
property of a certain Mrs. Beggarly, who, in spite of her name, seems to
have been rich in medical knowledge and possessions. The famous Thomas
Bartholinus wrote a treatise on the virtues of this fabulous-sounding
remedy, which was published in 1641, and republished in 1678.
The “antimonial cup,” a drinking vessel made of that metal, which, like
our quassia-wood cups, might be filled and emptied in saecula saeculorum
without exhausting its virtues, is mentioned by Matthew Cradock, in a
letter to the elder Winthrop, but in a doubtful way, as it was thought,
he says, to have shortened the days of Sir Nathaniel Riche; and Winthrop
himself, as I think, refers to its use, calling it simply “the cup.” An
antimonial cup is included in the inventory of Samuel Seabury, who died
1680, and is valued at five shillings. There is a treatise entitled “The
Universall Remedy, or the Vertues of the Antimoniall Cup, By John Evans,
Minister and Preacher of God's Word, London, 1634,” in our own Society's
library.
One other special remedy deserves notice, because of native growth. I
do not know when Culver's root, Leptandra Virginica of our National
Pharmacopoeia, became noted, but Cotton Mather, writing in 1716 to
John Winthrop of New London, speaks of it as famous for the cure of
consumptions, and wishes to get some of it, through his mediation, for
Katharine, his eldest daughter. He gets it, and gives it to the
“poor damsel,” who is languishing, as he says, and who dies the next
month,--all the sooner, I have little doubt, for this uncertain and
violent drug, with which the meddlesome pedant tormented her in that
spirit of well-meant but restless quackery, which could touch nothing
without making mischief, not even a quotation, and yet proved at length
the means of bringing a great blessing to our community, as we shall see
by and by; so does Providence use our very vanities and infirmities for
its wise purposes.
Externally, I find the practitioners on whom I have chiefly relied
used the plasters of Paracelsus, of melilot, diachylon, and probably
diaphoenicon, all well known to the old pharmacopoeias, and some of them
to the modern ones,--to say nothing of “my yellow salve,” of Governor
John, the second, for the composition of which we must apply to his
respected descendant.
The authors I find quoted are Barbette's Surgery, Camerarius on Gout,
and Wecherus, of all whom notices may be found in the pages of Haller
and Vanderlinden; also, Reed's Surgery, and Nicholas Culpeper's
Practice of Physic and Anatomy, the last as belonging to Samuel Seabury,
chirurgeon, before mentioned. Nicholas Culpeper was a shrewd charlatan,
and as impudent a varlet as ever prescribed for a colic; but knew very
well what he was about, and badgers the College with great vigor. A copy
of Spigelius's famous Anatomy, in the Boston Athenaeum, has the names
of Increase and Samuel Mather written in it, and was doubtless early
overhauled by the youthful Cotton, who refers to the great anatomist's
singular death, among his curious stories in the “Magnalia,” and quotes
him among nearly a hundred authors whom he cites in his manuscript
“The Angel of Bethesda.” Dr. John Clark's “books and instruments,
with several chirurgery materials in the closet,” were valued in his
inventory at sixty pounds; Dr. Matthew Fuller, who died in 1678, left a
library valued at ten pounds; and a surgeon's chest and drugs valued at
sixteen pounds.'
Here we leave the first century and all attempts at any further detailed
accounts of medicine and its practitioners. It is necessary to show in a
brief glance what had been going on in Europe during the latter part of
that century, the first quarter of which had been made illustrious in
the history of medical science by the discovery of the circulation.
Charles Barbeyrac, a Protestant in his religion, was a practitioner
and teacher of medicine at Montpellier. His creed was in the way of
his obtaining office; but the young men followed his instructions with
enthusiasm. Religious and scientific freedom breed in and in, until it
becomes hard to tell the family of one from that of the other. Barbeyrac
threw overboard the old complex medical farragos of the pharmacopoeias,
as his church had disburdened itself of the popish ceremonies.
Among the students who followed his instructions were two Englishmen:
one of them, John Locke, afterwards author of an “Essay on the Human
Understanding,” three years younger than his teacher; the other, Thomas
Sydenham, five years older. Both returned to England. Locke, whose
medical knowledge is borne witness to by Sydenham, had the good
fortune to form a correct opinion on a disease from which the Earl of
Shaftesbury was suffering, which led to an operation that saved
his life. Less felicitous was his experience with a certain ancilla
culinaria virgo,--which I am afraid would in those days have
been translated kitchen-wench, instead of lady of the culinary
department,--who turned him off after she had got tired of him, and
called in another practitioner. [Locke and Sydenham, p. 124. By
John Brown, M. D. Edinburgh, 1866.] This helped, perhaps, to spoil a
promising doctor, and make an immortal metaphysician. At any rate, Locke
laid down the professional wig and cane, and took to other studies.
The name of Thomas Sydenham is as distinguished in the history of
medicine as that of John Locke in philosophy. As Barbeyrac was found in
opposition to the established religion, as Locke took the rational side
against orthodox Bishop Stillingfleet, so Sydenham went with Parliament
against Charles, and was never admitted a Fellow by the College of
Physicians, which, after he was dead, placed his bust in their hall by
the side of that of Harvey.
What Sydenham did for medicine was briefly this: he studied the course
of diseases carefully, and especially as affected by the particular
season; to patients with fever he gave air and cooling drinks, instead
of smothering and heating them, with the idea of sweating out their
disease; he ordered horseback exercise to consumptives; he, like his
teacher, used few and comparatively simple remedies; he did not give any
drug at all, if he thought none was needed, but let well enough alone.
He was a sensible man, in short, who applied his common sense to
diseases which he had studied with the best light of science that he
could obtain.
The influence of the reform he introduced must have been more or
less felt in this country, but not much before the beginning of the
eighteenth century, as his great work was not published until 1675, and
then in Latin. I very strongly suspect that there was not so much to
reform in the simple practice of the physicians of the new community, as
there was in that of the learned big-wigs of the “College,” who valued
their remedies too much in proportion to their complexity, and the
extravagant and fantastic ingredients which went to their making.
During the memorable century which bred and bore the Revolution, the
medical profession gave great names to our history. But John Brooks
belonged to the State, and Joseph Warren belongs to the country and
mankind, and to speak of them would lead me beyond my limited subject.
There would be little pleasure in dwelling on the name of Benjamin
Church; and as for the medical politicians, like Elisha Cooke in the
early part of the century, or Charles Jarvis, the bald eagle of Boston,
in its later years, whether their practice was heroic or not, their
patients were, for he is a bold man who trusts one that is making
speeches and coaxing voters, to meddle with the internal politics of his
corporeal republic.
One great event stands out in the medical history of this eighteenth
century; namely, the introduction of the practice of inoculation for
small-pox. Six epidemics of this complaint had visited Boston in the
course of a hundred years. Prayers had been asked in the churches for
more than a hundred sick in a single day, and this many times. About a
thousand persons had died in a twelvemonth, we are told, and, as we may
infer, chiefly from this cause.
In 1721, this disease, after a respite of nineteen years, again appeared
as an epidemic. In that year it was that Cotton Mather, browsing, as
was his wont, on all the printed fodder that came within reach of
his ever-grinding mandibles, came upon an account of inoculation as
practised in Turkey, contained in the “Philosophical Transactions.” He
spoke of it to several physicians, who paid little heed to his story;
for they knew his medical whims, and had probably been bored, as we say
now-a-days, many of them, with listening to his “Angel of Bethesda,” and
satiated with his speculations on the Nishmath Chajim.
The Reverend Mather,--I use a mode of expression he often employed when
speaking of his honored brethren,--the Reverend Mather was right this
time, and the irreverent doctors who laughed at him were wrong. One only
of their number disputes his claim to giving the first impulse to the
practice in Boston. This is what that person says: “The Small-Pox spread
in Boston, New England, 1721, and the Reverend Dr. Cotton Mather, having
had the use of these Communications from Dr. William Douglass (that is,
the writer of these words); surreptitiously, without the knowledge of
his Informer, that he might have the honour of a New fangled notion,
sets an Undaunted Operator to work, and in this Country about 290 were
inoculated.”
All this has not deprived Cotton Mather of the credit of suggesting, and
a bold and intelligent physician of the honor of carrying out, the new
practice. On the twenty-seventh day of June, 1721, Zabdiel Boylston
of Boston inoculated his only son for smallpox,--the first person ever
submitted to the operation in the New World. The story of the fierce
resistance to the introduction of the practice; of how Boylston was
mobbed, and Mather had a hand-grenade thrown in at his window; of
how William Douglass, the Scotchman, “always positive, and sometimes
accurate,” as was neatly said of him, at once depreciated the practice
and tried to get the credit of suggesting it, and how Lawrence Dalhonde,
the Frenchman, testified to its destructive consequences; of how Edmund
Massey, lecturer at St. Albans, preached against sinfully endeavoring to
alter the course of nature by presumptuous interposition, which he would
leave to the atheist and the scoffer, the heathen and unbeliever, while
in the face of his sermon, afterwards reprinted in Boston, many of our
New England clergy stood up boldly in defence of the practice,--all this
has been told so well and so often that I spare you its details. Set
this good hint of Cotton Mather against that letter of his to John
Richards, recommending the search after witch-marks, and the application
of the water-ordeal, which means throw your grandmother into the water,
if she has a mole on her arm;--if she swims, she is a witch and must be
hanged; if she sinks, the Lord have mercy on her soul!
Thus did America receive this great discovery, destined to save
thousands of lives, via Boston, from the hands of one of our own
Massachusetts physicians.
The year 1735 was rendered sadly memorable by the epidemic of the
terrible disease known as “throat distemper,” and regarded by many as
the same as our “diphtheria.” Dr. Holyoke thinks the more general use
of mercurials in inflammatory complaints dates from the time of their
employment in this disease, in which they were thought to have proved
specially useful.
At some time in the course of this century medical practice had settled
down on four remedies as its chief reliance. I must repeat an incident
which I have related in another of these Essays. When Dr. Holyoke,
nearly seventy years ago, received young Mr. James Jackson as his
student, he showed him the formidable array of bottles, jars, and
drawers around his office, and then named the four remedies referred to
as being of more importance than all the rest put together. These were
“Mercury, Antimony, Opium, and Peruvian Bark.” I doubt if either of
them remembered that, nearly seventy years before, in 1730, Dr.
William Douglass, the disputatious Scotchman, mentioned those same four
remedies, in the dedication of his quarrelsome essay on inoculation, as
the most important ones in the hands of the physicians of his time.
In the “Proceedings” of this Society for the year 1863 is a very
pleasant paper by the late Dr. Ephraim Eliot, giving an account of
the leading physicians of Boston during the last quarter of the last
century. The names of Lloyd, Gardiner, Welsh, Rand, Bulfinch, Danforth,
John Warren, Jeffries, are all famous in local history, and are
commemorated in our medical biographies. One of them, at least, appears
to have been more widely known, not only as one of the first aerial
voyagers, but as an explorer in the almost equally hazardous realm of
medical theory. Dr. John Jeffries, the first of that name, is considered
by Broussais as a leader of medical opinion in America, and so referred
to in his famous “Examen des Doctrines Medicales.”
Two great movements took place in this eighteenth century, the effect of
which has been chiefly felt in our own time; namely, the establishment
of the Massachusetts Medical Society, and the founding of the Medical
School of Harvard University.
The third century of our medical history began with the introduction of
the second great medical discovery of modern times,--of all time up to
that date, I may say,--once more via Boston, if we count the University
village as its suburb, and once more by one of our Massachusetts
physicians. In the month of July, 1800, Dr. Benjamin Waterhouse of
Cambridge submitted four of his own children to the new process of
vaccination,--the first persons vaccinated, as Dr. Zabdiel Boylston's
son had been the first person inoculated in the New World.
A little before the first half of this century was completed, in the
autumn of 1846, the great discovery went forth from the Massachusetts
General Hospital, which repaid the debt of America to the science of the
Old World, and gave immortality to the place of its origin in the memory
and the heart of mankind. The production of temporary insensibility at
will--tuto, cito, jucunde, safely, quickly, pleasantly--is one of those
triumphs over the infirmities of our mortal condition which change the
aspect of life ever afterwards. Rhetoric can add nothing to its glory;
gratitude, and the pride permitted to human weakness, that our Bethlehem
should have been chosen as the birthplace of this new embodiment of the
divine mercy, are all we can yet find room for.
The present century has seen the establishment of all those great
charitable institutions for the cure of diseases of the body and of the
mind, which our State and our city have a right to consider as among the
chief ornaments of their civilization.
The last century had very little to show, in our State, in the way of
medical literature. The worthies who took care of our grandfathers and
great-grandfathers, like the Revolutionary heroes, fought (with disease)
and bled (their patients) and died (in spite of their own remedies); but
their names, once familiar, are heard only at rare intervals. Honored
in their day, not unremembered by a few solitary students of the past,
their memories are going sweetly to sleep in the arms of the patient
old dry-nurse, whose “blackdrop” is the never-failing anodyne of
the restless generations of men. Except the lively controversy on
inoculation, and floating papers in journals, we have not much of value
for that long period, in the shape of medical records.
But while the trouble with the last century is to find authors to
mention, the trouble of this would be to name all that we find. Of
these, a very few claim unquestioned preeminence.
Nathan Smith, born in Rehoboth, Mass., a graduate of the Medical School
of our University, did a great work for the advancement of medicine and
surgery in New England, by his labors as teacher and author, greater,
it is claimed by some, than was ever done by any other man. The two
Warrens, of our time, each left a large and permanent record of a most
extended surgical practice. James Jackson not only educated a whole
generation by his lessons of wisdom, but bequeathed some of the most
valuable results of his experience to those who came after him, in a
series of letters singularly pleasant and kindly as well as instructive.
John Ware, keen and cautious, earnest and deliberate, wrote the two
remarkable essays which have identified his name, for all time, with
two important diseases, on which he has shed new light by his original
observations.
I must do violence to the modesty of the living by referring to the many
important contributions to medical science by Dr. Jacob Bigelow, and
especially to his discourse on “Self-limited Diseases,” an address which
can be read in a single hour, but the influence of which will be felt
for a century.