SOME PHASES OF EARLY COLONIAL LIFE.
Much of the depression evident in Anne Bradstreet's earlier verses
came from the circumstances of her family life. No woman could
have been less fitted to bear absence from those nearest to her,
and though her adhesive nature had made her take as deep root in
Ipswich, as if further change could not come, she welcomed
anything that diminished the long separations, and made her
husband's life center more at home. One solace seems to have been
always open to her, her longest poem, the "Four Monarchies,"
showing her devotion to Ancient history and the thoroughness with
which she had made it her own. Anatomy seems to have been studied
also, the "Four Humours in Man's Constitution," showing an
intimate acquaintance with the anatomical knowledge of the day;
but in both cases it was not, as one might infer from her
references to Greek and Latin authors, from original sources. Sir
Walter Raleigh's "History of the World," Archbishop Usher's
"Annals of the World," and Pemble's "Period of the Persian
Monarchy," were all found in Puritan libraries, though she may
have had access to others while still in England. Pemble was in
high favor as an authority in Biblical exposition, the title of
his book being a stimulant to every student of the prophecies:
"The Period of the Persian Monarchy, wherein sundry places of
Ezra, Nehemiah and Daniel are cleared, Extracted, contracted and
Englished, (much of it out of Dr. Raynolds) by the late learned
and godly man, Mr. William Pemble, of Magdalen Hall, in Oxford."
This she read over and over again, and many passages in her poem
on the "Four Monarchies" are merely paraphrases of this and
Raleigh's work, though before a second edition was printed she had
read Plutarch, and altered here and there as she saw fit to
introduce his rendering. Galen and Hippocrates, whom she mentions
familiarly, were known to her through the work of the "curious
learned Crooke," his "Description of the Body of Man, Collected
and Translated out of all the best Authors on Anatomy, especially
out of Gasper, Banchinus, and A. Sourentius," being familiar to
all students of the day.
If her muse could but have roused to a sense of what was going on
about her, and recorded some episodes which Winthrop dismisses
with a few words, we should be under obligations that time could
only deepen. Why, for instance, could she not have given her
woman's view of that indomitable "virgin mother of Taunton,"
profanely described by Governor Winthrop as "an ancient maid, one
Mrs. Poole. She went late thither, and endured much hardships, and
lost much cattle. Called, after, Taunton."
Precisely why Mrs. Poole chose Tecticutt, afterward Titicut, for
her venture is not known, but the facts of her rash experiment
must have been discussed at length, and moved less progressive
maids and matrons to envy or pity as the chance might be. But not
a hint of this surprising departure can be found in any of
Mistress Bradstreet's remains, and it stands, with no comment save
that of the diligent governor's faithful pen, as the first example
of an action, to be repeated in these later days in prairie farms
and Western ranches by women who share the same spirit, though
more often young than "ancient" maids. But ancient, though in her
case a just enough characterization, was a term of reproach for
any who at sixteen or eighteen at the utmost, remained unmarried,
and our present custom of calling every maiden under forty,
"girl" would have struck the Puritan mothers with a sense of
preposterousness fully equal to ours at some of their doings.
A hundred years passed, and then an appreciative kinsman, who had
long enjoyed the fruit of her labors, set up "a faire slab," still
to be seen in the old burying ground.
HERE RESTS THE REMAINS
OF
MRS. ELIZABETH POOL,
A NATIVE OF OLD ENGLAND,
Of good family, friends and prospects,
all which she left in the prime of her life, to enjoy the
religion of her conscience in this distant wilderness;
A great proprietor of the township of Taunton,
A chief promoter of its settlement and its incorporation
1639-40,
about which time she settled near this spot; and,
having employed the opportunity
of her virgin state in piety, liberality and sanctity of manners,
Died May 21st A.D. 1654, aged 65.
to whose memory
this monument is gratefully erected by her next of kin,
JOHN BORLAND, ESQUIRE,
A.D. 1771.
Undoubtedly every detail of this eccentric settlement was talked
over at length, as everything was talked over. Gossip never had
more forcible reason for existence, for the church covenant
compelled each member to a practical oversight of his neighbor's
concerns, the special clause reading: "We agree to keep mutual
watch and ward over one another."
At first, united by a common peril, the dangers of this were less
perceptible. The early years held their own necessities for
discussion, and the records of the time are full of matter that
Anne Bradstreet might have used had she known her opportunity. She
was weighed down like every conscientious Puritan of the day not
only by a sense of the infinitely great, but quite as strenuously
by the infinitely little. It is plain that she saw more clearly
than many of her time, and there are no indications in her works
of the small superstitions held by all. Superstition had changed
its name to Providence, and every item of daily action was
believed to be under the constant supervision and interference of
the Almighty. The common people had ceased to believe in fairies
and brownies, but their places had been filled by Satan's imps and
messengers, watchful for some chance to confound the elect.
The faith in dreams and omens of every sort was not lessened by
the transferrence of the responsibility for them to the Lord, and
the superstition of the day, ended later in a credulity that
accepted the Salem Witchcraft delusion with all its horrors,
believing always, that diligent search would discover, if not the
Lord's, then the devil's hand, working for the edification or
confounding of the elect. Even Winthrop does not escape, and in
the midst of wise suggestions for the management of affairs
sandwiches such a record as the following: "At Watertown there was
(in the view of divers witnesses) a great combat between a mouse
and a snake; and after a long fight, the mouse prevailed and
killed the snake. The pastor of Boston, Mr. Wilson, a very
sincere, holy man, hearing of it, gave this interpretation: That
the snake was the devil; the mouse was a poor, contemptible,
people, which God had brought hither, which should overcome Satan
here, and dispossess him of his kingdom. Upon the same occasion,
he told the governor that, before he was resolved to come into
this country, he dreamed he was here, and that he saw a church
arise out of the earth, which grew up and became a marvelously
goodly church."
They had absolute faith that prayer would accomplish all things,
even to strengthening a defective memory. Thomas Shepard, whose
autobiography is given in Young's "Chronicles of Massachusetts
Bay," gave this incident in his life when a student and "ambitious
of learning and being a scholar; and hence, when I could not take
notes of the sermon I remember I was troubled at it, and prayed
the Lord earnestly that he would help me to note sermons; and I
see some cause of wondering at the Lord's providence therein; for
as soon as ever I had prayed (after my best fashion) Him for it, I
presently, the next Sabbath, was able to take notes, who the
precedent Sabbath, could do nothing at all that way."
Anthony Thacher, whose story may have been told in person to
Governor Dudley's family, and whose written description of his
shipwreck, included in Young's "Chronicles," is one of the most
picturesque pieces of writing the time affords, wrote, with a
faith that knew no question: "As I was sliding off the rock into
the sea the Lord directed my toes into a joint in the rock's side,
as also the tops of some of my fingers, with my right hand, by
means whereof, the wave leaving me, I remained so, hanging on the
rock, only my head above water."
When individual prayer failed to accomplish a desired end, a fast
and the united storming of heaven, never failed to bring victory
to the besiegers. Thus Winthrop writes: "Great harm was done in
corn, (especially wheat and barley) in this month, by a
caterpillar, like a black worm about an inch and a half long. They
eat up first the blades of the stalk, then they eat up the
tassels, whereupon the ear withered. It was believed by divers
good observers, that they fell in a great thunder shower, for
divers yards and other places, where not one of them was to be
seen an hour before, were immediately after the shower almost
covered with them, besides grass places where they were not so
easily discerned. They did the most harm in the southern
parts.... In divers places the churches kept a day of humiliation,
and presently after, the caterpillars vanished away."
Still another instance, the fame of which spread through the whole
Colony and confounded any possible doubter, found record in the
"Magnalia", that storehouse of fact so judiciously combined with
fable that the author himself could probably never tell what he
had himself seen, and what had been gleaned from others. Mr. John
Wilson, the minister of the church at Boston until the arrival of
Cotton, was journeying with a certain Mr. Adams, when tidings came
to the latter of the probably fatal illness of his daughter. "Mr.
Wilson, looking up to heaven, began mightily to wrestle with God
for the life of the young woman ... then, turning himself about
unto Mr. Adams, 'Brother,' said he, 'I trust your daughter shall
live; I believe in God she shall recover of this sickness.' And so
it marvelously came to pass, and she is now the fruitful mother of
several desirable children."
Among the books brought over by John Winthrop the younger, was a
volume containing the Greek testament, the Psalms, and the English
Common Prayer, bound together, to which happened an accident,
which was gravely described by the Governor in his daily history
of events:
"Decem 15. About this time there fell out a thing worthy of
observation. Mr. Winthrop the younger, one of the magistrates,
having many books in a chamber where there was corn of divers
sorts, had among them one, wherein the Greek testament, the psalms
and the common prayer were bound together. He found the common
prayer eaten with mice, every leaf of it, and not any of the two
other touched, nor any other of his books, though there were above
a thousand. Not a Puritan of them all, unless it may be the
governor himself, but believed that the mice were agents of
the Almighty sent to testify His dissatisfaction with the
objectionable form of prayer, and not a fact in daily life but
became more and more the working of Providence. Thus, as the good
governor records later:
"A godly woman of the church of Boston, dwelling sometimes in
London, brought with her a parcel of very fine linen of great
value, which she set her heart too much upon, and had been at
charge to have it all newly washed, and curiously folded and
pressed, and so left it in press in her parlor over night. She had
a negro maid went into the room very late, and let fall some snuff
of the candle upon the linen, so as by morning all the linen was
burned to tinder, and the boards underneath, and some stools and a
part of the wainscot burned and never perceived by any in the
house, though some lodged in the chamber overhead, and no ceiling
between. But it pleased God that the loss of this linen did her
much good, both in taking off her heart from worldly comforts, and
in preparing her for a far greater affliction by the untimely
death of her husband, who was slain not long after at Isle of
Providence."
The thrifty housewife's heart goes out to this sister, whose
"curiously folded and pressed linen," lavender-scented and fair, was
the one reminder of the abounding and generous life from which she
had come. It may have been a comfort to consider its loss a direct
dispensation for her improvement, and by this time, natural causes
were allowed to have no existence save as they became tools of this
"Wonder-working Providence." It was the day of small things more
literally than they knew, and in this perpetual consideration of
small things, the largeness of their first purpose dwindled and
contracted, and inconceivable pettiness came at last to be the seal
upon much of their action. Mr. Johnson, a minister whose course is
commented upon by Bradford, excommunicated his brother and own
father, for disagreement from him in certain points of doctrine,
though the same zeal weakened when called upon to act against his
wife, who doubtless had means of influencing his judgment unknown to
the grave elders who remonstrated. But the interest was as strong in
the cut of a woman's sleeve as in the founding of a new Plantation.
They mourned over their own degeneracy. "The former times were
better than these," the croakers sighed, and Governor Bradford wrote
of this special case; "In our time his wife was a grave matron, and
very modest both in her apparel and all her demeanor, ready to any
good works in her place, and helpful to many, especially the poor,
and an ornament to his calling. She was a young widow when he
married her, and had been a merchant's wife by whom he had a good
estate, and was a godly woman; and because she wore such apparel as
she had been formerly used to, which were neither excessive nor
immodest, for their chiefest exception were against her wearing of
some whalebone in the bodice and sleeves of her gown, corked shoes
and other such like things as the citizens of her rank then used to
wear. And although, for offence sake, she and he were willing to
reform the fashions of them, so far as might be, without spoiling of
their garments, yet it would not content them except they came full
up to their size. Such was the strictness or rigidness (as now the
term goes) of some in those times, as we can by experience and of
our own knowledge, show in other instances."
Governor Bradford, who evidently leans in his own mind toward the
side of Mistress Johnson, proceeds to show the undue severity of
some of the brethren in Holland. "We were in the company of a
godly man that had been a long time prisoner at Norwich for this
cause, and was by Judge Cooke set at liberty. After going into the
country he visited his friends, and returning that way again to go
into the Low Countries by ship at Yarmouth, and so desired some of
us to turn in with him to the house of an ancient woman in the
city, who had been very kind and helpful to him in his sufferings.
She knowing his voice, made him very welcome, and those with him.
But after some time of their entertainment, being ready to depart,
she came up to him and felt of his hand (for her eyes were dim
with age) and perceiving it was something stiffened with starch,
she was much displeased and reproved him very sharply, fearing God
would not prosper his journey. Yet the man was a plain country
man, clad in gray russet, without either welt or guard (as the
proverb is) and the band he wore, scarce worth three-pence, made
of their own home-spinning; and he was godly and humble as he was
plain. What would such professors, if they were now living, say to
the excess of our times?"
Women spoke their minds much more freely in the early days than
later they were allowed to, this same "ancient woman" of
Amsterdam, having a sister worker of equally uncompromising tongue
and tendencies, who was, for her various virtues chosen as
deaconess, "and did them service for many years, though she was
sixty years of age when she was chosen. She honored her place and
was an ornament to the congregation. She usually sat in a
convenient place in the congregation, with a little birchen rod in
her hand, and kept little children in great awe from disturbing
the congregation. She did frequently visit the sick and weak,
especially women, and, as there was need, called out maids and
young women to watch and do them other helps as their necessity
did require; and if they were poor, she would gather relief for
them of those that were able, or acquaint the deacons; and she was
obeyed as a mother in Israel and an officer of Christ."
Whether this dame had the same objection to starch as the more
"ancient" one, is not recorded, but in any case she was not alone.
Men and women alike, forswore the desired stiffness, retaining it
only in their opinions. By the time that Anne Bradstreet had settled
in Andover, bodily indulgence so far as adornment or the
gratification of appetite went, had become a matter for courts to
decide upon. Whether Simon Bradstreet gave up the curling locks
which, while not flowing to his shoulders as in Colonel Hutchinson's
case, still fell in thick rings about his neck, we have no means of
knowing. His wife would naturally protest against the cropping,
brought about by the more extreme, "who put their own cropped heads
together in order to devise some scheme for compelling all other
heads to be as well shorn as theirs were."
One of the first acts of John Endecott when again appointed governor
of Massachusetts Bay, was "to institute a solemn association against
long hair," but his success was indifferent, as evidenced in many a
moan from reverend ministers and deacons. John Eliot, one of the
sweetest and most saintly spirits among them, wrote that it was a
"luxurious feminine prolixity for men to wear their hair long and to
... ruffle their heads in excesses of this kind," but in later
years, with many another wearied antagonist of this abomination,
added hopelessly--"the lust is insuperable." Tobacco was fulminated
against with equal energy, but no decree of court could stamp out
the beloved vice. Winthrop yielded to it, but afterward renounced
it, and the ministers compared its smoke to the smoke ascending from
the bottomless pit, but no denunciation could effectually bar it
out, and tobacco and starch in the end asserted their right to
existence and came into constant use. A miraculous amount of energy
had been expended upon the heinousness of their use, and the very
fury of protest brought a reaction equally strong. Radical even in
her conservatism, New England sought to bind in one, two hopelessly
incompatible conditions: intellectual freedom and spiritual slavery.
Absolute obedience to an accepted formula of faith was hardly likely
to remain a fact for a community where thought was stimulated not
only by education and training but every circumstance of their daily
lives. A people who had lived on intimate terms with the innermost
counsels of the Almighty, and who listened for hours on Sunday to
speculations on the component elements not only of the Almighty, but
of all His works were, while apparently most reverential, losing all
capacity for reverence in any ancient sense. Undoubtedly this very
speculation did much to give breadth and largeness, too much belief
preparing the way, first, for no belief, and, at last, for a return
to the best in the old and a combination of certain features of the
new, which seems destined to make something better for practical as
well as spiritual life than the world has ever known.
The misfortune of the early Puritan was in too rigid a creed, too
settled an assurance that all the revelation needed had been
given. Unlike the Dunkard elders, who refused to formulate a
creed, lest it should put them in a mental attitude that would
hinder further glimpses of truth, they hastened to bind themselves
and all generations to come in chains, which began to rattle
before the last link was forged. Not a Baptist, or Quaker, or
Antinomian but gave himself to the work of protestation, and the
determined effort to throw off the tyranny and presumption of men
no wiser than he. Whippings, imprisonments and banishments
silenced these spirits temporarily, but the vibration of particles
never ceased, and we know the final result of such action. No
wonder that the silent work of disintegration, when it showed
itself in the final apparent collapse of all creeds, was looked
upon with horrified amazement, and a hasty gathering up of all the
old particles with a conviction that fusing and forging again was
as easy of accomplishment now as in the beginning. The attempt has
proved their error.
Up to nearly the opening of the eighteenth century New England
life kept pace with the advances in England. There was constant
coming and going and a sense of common interests and common needs.
But even before emigration practically ceased, the changes in
modes of speech were less marked than in the old home. English
speech altered in many points during the seventeenth century.
Words dropped out of use, their places filled by a crowd of
claimants, sometimes admitted after sharp scrutiny, as often
denied, but ending in admitting themselves, as words have a trick
of doing even when most thoroughly outlawed. But in New England
the old methods saw no reason for change.
Forms of speech current in the England of the seventeenth century
crystallized here and are heard to-day. "Yankeeisms" is their
popular title, but the student of old English knows them rather as
"Anglicisms." "Since the year 1640 the New England race has not
received any notable addition to its original stock, and to-day
their Anglican blood is as genuine and unmixed as that of any
county in England."
Dr. Edward Freeman, in his "Impressions of America," says of New
England particularly, the remark applying in part also to all the
older states: "When anything that seems strange to a British
visitor in American speech or American manners is not quite modern
on the face of it, it is pretty certain to be something which was
once common to the older and the newer England, but which the
newer England has kept, while the older England has cast it
aside." Such literature as had birth in New England adhered
chiefly to the elder models, and has thus an archaic element that
broader life and intercourse would have eliminated. The provincial
stage, of feeble and uncertain, or stilled but equally uncertain
expression was at hand, but for the first generation or so the
colonists had small time to consider forms of speech. Their
passion for knowledge, however, took on all the vitality that had
forsaken English ground, and that from that day to this, has made
the first thought of every New England community, East or West, a
school. Their corner-stone "rested upon a book." It has been
calculated that there was one Cambridge graduate for every two-
hundred and fifty inhabitants, and within six years from the
landing of John Winthrop and his party, Harvard College had begun
its work of baffling "that old deluder, Sathan," whose business in
part it was "to keep men from the knowledge of the Scriptures." To
secular learning they were indifferent, but every man must be able
to give reason for the faith that was in him, and the more tongues
in which such statement could be made the more confusion for this
often embarrassed but still undismayed Sathan. Orders of nobility
among them had passed. Very rarely were they joined by even a
simple "Sir," and as years went on, nobility came to be synonymous
with tyranny, and there was less and less love for every owner of
a title. To them the highest earthly distinction came to be found
in the highest learning. The earnest student deserved and obtained
all the honors that man could give him, and his epitaph even
recorded the same solemn and deep-seated admiration. "The ashes of
an hard student, a good scholar, and a great Christian."
Anne Bradstreet shared this feeling to the full, and might easily
have been the mother of whom Mather writes as saying to her little
boy: "Child, if God make thee a good Christian and a good scholar,
thou hast all that thy mother ever asked for thee." Simon
Bradstreet became both, and in due time pleased his mother by
turning sundry of her "Meditations" into Latin prose, in which
stately dress they are incorporated in her works. The New England
woman kept up as far as possible the same pursuits in which she
had been trained, and among others the concoction of innumerable
tinctures and waters, learned in the 'still-room' of every
substantial English home. Room might have given place to a mere
corner, but the work went on with undiminished interest and
enthusiasm. There were few doctors, and each family had its own
special formulas--infallible remedies for all ordinary diseases
and used indiscriminately and in combination where a case seemed
to demand active treatment. They believed in their own medicines
absolutely, and required equal faith in all upon whom they
bestowed them.
Sturdy English stock as were all these New England dames, and
blessed with a power of endurance which it required more than one
generation to lessen, they were as given to medicine-taking as
their descendants of to-day, and fully as certain that their own
particular prescription was more efficacious than all the rest put
together. Anne Bradstreet had always been delicate, and as time
went on grew more and more so. The long voyage and confinement to
salt food had developed certain tendencies that never afterward
left her, and there is more than a suspicion that scurvy had
attacked her among the rest. Every precaution was taken by
Governor Winthrop to prevent such danger for those who came later,
and he writes to his wife, directing her preparations for the
voyage: "Be sure to be warme clothed & to have store of fresh
provisions, meale, eggs putt up in salt or ground mault, butter,
ote meal, pease & fruits, & a large strong chest or 2, well
locked, to keep these provisions in; & be sure they be bestowed in
the shippe where they may be readyly come by.... Be sure to have
ready at sea 2 or 3 skilletts of several syzes, a large fryinge
panne, a small stewinge panne, & a case to boyle a pudding in;
store of linnen for use at sea, & sacke to bestow among the
saylors: some drinking vessells & peuter & other vessells."
Dr. Nathaniel Wright, a famous physician of Hereford, and private
physician to Oliver Cromwell for a time, had given Winthrop various
useful prescriptions, and his medicines were in general use,
Winthrop adding in this letter: "For physick you shall need no
other but a pound of Doctor Wright's _Electuariu lenitivu_, & his
direction to use it, a gallon of scirvy grasse, to drink a litle 5
or 6 morninges together, with some saltpeter dissolved in it, & a
little grated or sliced nutmeg."
Dr. Wright's prescriptions were supplemented by a collection
prepared for him by Dr. Edward Stafford of London, all of which
were used with great effect, the governor's enthusiasm for medical
receipts and amateur practice, passing on through several
generations. A letter to his son John at Ispwich contains some of
his views and a prescription for pills which were undoubtedly
taken faithfully by Mistress Anne and administered as faithfully
to the unwilling Simon, who like herself suffered from one or two
attacks of fever. The colonists were, like all breakers of new
ground, especially susceptible to fevers of every variety, and
Governor Winthrop writes anxiously: "You must be very careful of
taking cold about the loins; & when the ground is open, I will
send you some pepper-wort roots. For the flux, there is no better
medicine than the cup used two or three times, &, in case of
sudden torments, a clyster of a quart of water boiled to a pint,
which, with the quantity of two or three nutmegs of saltpetre
boiled in it, will give present ease.
"For the pills, they are made of grated pepper, made up with
turpentine, very stiff, and some flour withal; and four or five
taken fasting, & fast two hours after. But if there be any fever
with the flux, this must not be used till the fever is removed by
the cup."
Each remedy bears the internal warrant of an immediate need for a
fresh one, and it is easy to see from what source the national
love of patent medicines has been derived. Another prescription
faithfully tried by both giver and receiver, and which Anne
Bradstreet may have tested in her various fevers, was sent to John
Winthrop, Jr., by Sir Kenelm Digby and may be found with various
other singularities in the collections of the Massachusetts
Historical Society. "For all sorts of agues, I have of late tried
the following magnetical experiment with infallible success. Pare
the patient's nails when the fit is coming on, and put the parings
into a little bag of fine linen or sarsenet, and tie that about a
live eel's neck in a tub of water. The eel will die and the
patient will recover. And if a dog or hog eat that eel, they will
also die. I have known one that cured all deliriums and frenzies
whatsoever, and at once taking, with an elixer made of dew,
nothing but dew purified & nipped up in a glass & digested 15
months till all of it was become a gray powder, not one drop of
humidity remaining. This I know to be true, & that first it was as
black as ink, then green, then gray, & at 22 month's end it was as
white & lustrous as any oriental pearl. But it cured manias at 15
months' end."
The mania for taking it or anything else sufficiently mysterious
and unpleasant to give a value to its possession remains to this
day. But the prescriptions made up by the chief magistrate had a
double efficacy for a time that believed a king's touch held
instant cure for the king's evil, and that the ordinary marks
known to every physician familiar with the many phases of
hysteria, were the sign-manual of witches. The good governor's
list of remedies had been made up from the Stafford prescriptions,
the diseases he arranged to deal with being "plague, smallpox,
fevers, king's evil, insanity, and falling sickness," besides
broken bones and all ordinary injuries.
Simples and mineral drugs are used indiscriminately, and there is
one remedy on which Dr. Holmes comments, in an essay on "The
Medical Profession in Massachusetts," "made by putting live toads
into an earthern pot so as to half fill it, and baking and burning
them 'in the open ayre, not in a house'--concerning which latter
possibility I suspect Madam Winthrop would have had something to
say--until they could be reduced by pounding, first into a brown
and then into a black, powder." This powder was the infallible
remedy "against the plague, small-pox; purples, all sorts of
feavers; Poyson; either by way of Prevention or after Infection."
Consumption found a cure in a squirrel, baked alive and also
reduced to a Powder, and a horrible witches' broth of earth-worms
and other abominations served the same purpose. The governor makes
no mention of this, but he gives full details of an electuary of
millipedes, otherwise sowbugs, which seems to have been used with
distinguished success. Coral and amber were both powdered and used
in special cases, and antimony and nitre were handled freely, with
rhubarb and the whole series of ancient remedies. The Winthrop
papers hold numberless letters from friends and patients
testifying to the good he had done them or begging for further
benefactions, one of these from the agitator, Samuel Gostun, who
at eighty-two had ceased to trouble himself over anything but his
own infirmities, holding a wonder how "a thing so little in
quantity, so little in sent, so little in taste, and so little to
sence in operation, should beget and bring forth such efects."
These prescriptions were handed down through four generations of
Winthrops, who seem to have united law and medicine, a union less
common than that of divinity and medicine.
Michael Wigglesworth, whom we know best through his "Day of Doom,"
visited and prescribed for the sick, "not only as a Pastor but as
a Physician too, and this not only in his own town, but also in
all those of the vicinity." But this was in later days, when John
Eliot's desire had been accomplished, written to the Rev. Mr.
Shepard in 1647: "I have thought in my heart that it were a very
singular good work, if the Lord would stirre up the hearts of some
or other of his people in England, to give some maintenance toward
some Schoole or Collegiate exercise this way, wherein there should
be Anatomies and other instructions that way, and where there
might be some recompense given to any that should bring in any
vegetable or other thing that is vertuous in the way of Physick.
There is another reason which moves my thought and desires this
way, namely, that our young students in Physick may be trained up
better than they yet bee, who have onely theoreticall knowledge,
and are forced to fall to practice before ever they saw an Anatomy
made, or duely trained up in making experiments, for we never had
but one Anatomy in the countrey."
This anatomy had been made by Giles Firmin, who was the friend of
Winthrop and of the Bradstreet's, and who found the practice of
medicine so little profitable that he wrote to the former: "I am
strongly set upon to studye divinity; my studyes else must be
lost, for physick is but a meene helpe." A "meene helpe" it proved
for many years, during which the Puritan dames steeped herbs and
made ointments and lotions after formulas learned in the still-
room at home. The little Bradstreet's doubtless swallowed their
full share, though fortunately blessed for the most part with the
sturdy constitution of their father, who, save for a fever or two,
escaped most of the sicknesses common to the colonists and lived
through many serene and untroubled years of physical and mental
health, finding life enjoyable even at four-score and ten.