

386 JACOB BIGELOW. 



ing up, during the last thirty or forty years, in the neighborhood of our 

 chief cities and towns. It is hard to overrate the importance of this 

 great innovation on the time-honored custom which was fast becoming 

 a nuisance to the public health and an offence to the common feelings 

 of humanity. The close-packed tombs, liable to be used by unscrupu- 

 lous sextons as lodging-houses for any homeless dead whose means 

 would purchase a temporary resting-place ; the graves where one body 

 was piled on another until only a few inches of soil covered the last- 

 comer's coffin-lid, — gave place to the peaceful and secure rural retreat 

 where the dead could repose undisturbed and the living could resort 

 with pleasure. Not only was the project of the Mount Auburn Ceme- 

 tery due to Dr. Bigelow, but he furnished the designs for the fence 

 and gateway, the chapel and the tower, and for more than twenty 

 years officiated as President of the Corporation. 



In 1830, Dr. Bigelow published the " Elements of Technology," a 

 treatise on the application of the sciences to the useful arts, taken 

 chiefly from the lectures delivered by him as Rumford Professor at 

 Cambridge. This most convenient and valuable manual has since 

 been reprinted (1840) with additions, in two volumes, under the title 

 " The Useful Arts." 



In 1832, Dr. Bigelow was commissioned by the City of Boston, 

 with the late Dr. John Ware and Dr. Joshua B. Flint, to visit New 

 York to observe and report on the Asiatic cholera, then prevail- 

 ing in that city. So great was the fear of contagion at the time, that 

 the Committee, returning in one of the Sound steamers, were stopped 

 a mile below Providence by the health officers, and forbidden to come 

 on shore. Landing at Seekonk, they at length, after waiting a whole 

 day, made- their way to Boston in stage-coaches. 



In 1835, Dr. Bigelow delivered, as the annual address before the 

 Massachusetts Medical Society, his well-known discourse on " Self- 

 limited Diseases." This remarkable essay has probably had more in- 

 fluence on medical practice in America than any similar brief treatise, 

 we might say than any work, ever published in this country. Its 

 suggestions were scattered abroad at the exact fertilizing moment 

 when public opinion was matured enough for their reception. The 

 essay of Louis on blood-letting in pneumonia had shaken the belief 

 of many in the "strangling" of disease by heroic remedies. The 

 French expectant practice had been watched in the hospitals of Paris 

 by multitudes of students, who had become accustomed to see patient 

 waiting and mild palliatives take the place of the perturbing measures 

 familiar to English and American usage. Dr. Bigelow's discourse 



