Dr. Elisha Bartlett, physician, poet, and politician, was born at
Smithfield, Rhode Island, in 1805. He was graduated in medicine from
Brown University in 1826, and later practiced at Lowell,
Massachusetts, of which city he was the first mayor. Dr. Bartlett
lectured at Dartmouth College in 1839; and two years later he became
professor of the Theory and Practice of Medicine in the medical school
of Transylvania University, Lexington, Kentucky. He left Transylvania
in 1844, for the University of Maryland, but he returned to Lexington
two years later, occupying his former chair in the medical school. In
1849 Dr. Bartlett left Transylvania and went to Louisville, where he
delivered medical lectures for a year. From 1851 until his death he
was professor of materia medica and medical jurisprudence in the
College of Physicians and Surgeons of New York City. Dr. Bartlett died
at his birthplace, Smithfield, Rhode Island, July 18, 1855, one of the
most widely known of American physicians, and also well known and
highly regarded by medical men in Europe. His medical works are:
_Essay on the Philosophy of Medical Science_ (Philadelphia, 1844);
_Inquiry into the Degree of Certainty in Medicine_ (1848); _A
Discourse on the Life and Labours of Dr. Wells, the Discoverer of the
Philosophy of Dew_ (1849); _The Fevers of the United States_ (1850);
_Discourse on the Times, Character, and Works of Hippocrates_ (1852).
These are his medical works, but it is upon his small volume of poems,
_Simple Settings, in Verse, for Six Portraits and Pictures, from Mr.
Dickens's Gallery_ (Boston, 1855), that he is entitled to his place in
this work. Of this little book of but eighty pages, his friend, Dr.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, wrote: "Yet few suspected him of giving
utterance in rhythmical shape to his thoughts or feelings. It was only
when his failing limbs could bear him no longer, as conscious
existence slowly retreated from his palsied nerves, that he revealed
himself freely in truest and tenderest form of expression. We knew he
was dying by slow degrees, and we heard from him from time to time, or
saw him always serene and always hopeful while hope could have a place
in his earthly future.... When to the friends he loved there came, as
a farewell gift, ... a little book with a few songs in it--songs with
his whole warm heart in them--they knew that his hour was come, and
their tears fell fast as they read the loving thoughts that he had
clothed in words of beauty and melody. Among the memorials of
departed friendships, we treasure the little book of 'songs' ... his
last present, as it was his last production."
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Appletons' _Cyclopaedia of American Biography_ (New
York, 1887, v. i); _History of the Medical Department of
Transylvania University_, by Dr. Robert Peter (Louisville,
Kentucky, 1905).