JEFFRIES WYMAN. 379 



of his classmates remember the interest which was excited 

 among them by a skeleton which he made of a mammoth bull- 

 frog from Fresh Pond, probably one which is still preserved 

 in his museum of comparative anatomy. His skill and taste 

 in drawing, which he turned to such excellent account in his 

 investigations and in the lecture room, as well as his habit of 

 close observation of natural objects met with in his strolls, 

 were manifested even in boyhood. 



An attack of pneumonia during his senior year in college 

 caused much anxiety, and perhaps laid the foundation of the 

 pulmonary affection which burdened and finally shortened his 

 life. To recover from the effects of the attack, and to guard 

 against its return, he made, in the winter of 1833-34, the 

 first of those pilgrimages to the coast of the southern States, 

 which in later years were so often repeated. Returning with 

 strength renewed in the course of the following spring, be 

 began the study of medicine under Dr. John C. Dalton, who 

 had succeeded to his father's practice at Chelmsford, but who 

 soon removed to the adjacent and thriving town of Lowell. 

 Here, and with his father at the McLean Asylum and at the 

 Medical College in Boston, he passed two years of profitable 

 study. At the commencement of the third year he was 

 elected house-student in the medical department, at the Mas- 

 sachusetts General Hospital, — then under the charge of 

 Drs. James Jackson, John Ware, and Walter Channing, — 

 a responsible position, not only most advantageous for the 

 study of disease, but well adapted to sharpen a young man's 

 power of observation. 



In 1837, after receiving the degree of Doctor of Medicine, 

 he cast about among the larger country towns lor a field in 

 which to practise his profession. Fortunately for science he 

 found no opening to his mind ; so he took an office in Boston, 

 on Washington Street, and accepted the honorable but far 

 from lucrative post of demonstrator of anatomy under Dr. 

 John C. Warren, the Hersey professor. His means wire 

 very slender, and his life abstemious to the verge of privation : 

 for he was unwilling to burden his father, who indeed had 

 done all he could in providing for the education of two sons. 



