826 



SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. XIV. No. 361. 



EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 



Doubtless the student of universal med- 

 ical history, who, after tracing the wonder- 

 ful development of medicine in the century 

 of Harvey, Malpighi and Sydenham, is en- 

 gaged in following medical progress through 

 the eighteenth, century, marked by such, 

 names as those of Boerhaave, Haller, Mor- 

 gagni and Hunter, would not turn aside 

 long to note what the physicians of Connec- 

 ticut or, indeed, of any part of America were 

 doing at that time. Still the records of these 

 early Yale physicians have the interest 

 which attaches to the beginnings of things 

 which have become important, and for us 

 the special and sympathetic interest which 

 belongs to the annals of family and country. 



When the first physicians who had re- 

 ceived their collegiate training at Yale 

 appeared upon the scene early in the eight- 

 eenth century, the state of medicine in 

 this country had not advanced materially 

 beyond the primitive condition of the early 

 colonial days. We encounter, as in the 

 early history of medicine everywhere, three 

 classes of medical practitioners : the priest- 

 physician, the regular physician educated 

 and practicing according to the recognized 

 standards of the day, and the empiric or 

 charlatan. What Cotton Mather called 

 'the angelical conjunction' of the cure of 

 the soul and of the body was to be found 

 most frequently and in its best type in New 

 England. Here the regular training of 

 physicians was almost wholly by appren- 

 ticeship for three or four years to some 

 practitioner of repute. As vividly por- 

 trayed by a Connecticut physician, ''The 

 candidate ' served his time, ' as it was then 

 called, which was divided between the 

 books on the shelf, the skeleton in the 

 closet, the pestle and pill-slab in the back 

 room, roaming the forests and fields for 

 roots and herbs, and following, astride of 

 the colt he was breaking, the horse which 

 was honored with the saddlebags." 



Nor was this condition very materially 

 changed during the eighteenth century by 

 the founding of the Medical Departments 

 of the College of Philadelphia (now the 

 University of Pennsylvania) and of King's 

 College (now Columbia) in the decade be- 

 fore the Revolution and of those of Harvard 

 in 1783 and of Dartmouth in 1797. Dur- 

 ing this century only two graduates of Yale 

 College (John A. Graham, Y., 1768, and 

 AVinthrop Saltonstall,Y., 1793) had received 

 a medical degree in course. The number 

 of students from the New England colonies 

 who resorted to the medical schools of 

 Edinburgh, London or Ley den was ex- 

 tremely small, much smaller than that 

 from the Middle and Southern colonies. 



With the exception of a law passed in 

 New York in 1760 and a similar one in 

 New Jersey in 1772, there was no efi"ective 

 legislative control of medical practice in 

 any of the colonies. Any one who chose 

 could practice, and the root- doctors and 

 Indian doctors of Connecticut had their 

 counterparts elsewhere. More from the 

 sparseness and poverty of the population 

 than from the absence of disease, the remu- 

 neration from medical practice was so 

 small that the physician often added some 

 other occupation, most frequently agricul- 

 ture, to the practice of his profession. 



There were no hospitals, except pock- 

 houses, and practically no medical organi- 

 zation. There was little opportunity for 

 intercourse and interchange of views be- 

 tween physicians in different parts of the 

 country, so that local peculiarities of prac- 

 tice were more common then than now. 

 The only text- books were European, the 

 most authoritative on medical practice 

 being the works of Sydenham and of Boer- 

 haave, later also of van Swieten, Mead, 

 Huxham and Cullen. There was no Ameri- 

 can medical journal until near the end of 

 the eighteenth century. 



With two or three exceptions the few 



