NOVEMBEE 29, 1901.] 



SCIENCE. 



827 



original medical publications, mostly short 

 pamphlets, by American physicians before 

 the Eevolution contained scarcely any per- 

 sonal observations of importance, so that 

 the names of these physicians are remem- 

 bered to-day by their reputation among their 

 contemporaries and their influence upon 

 their successors, rather than by any actual 

 contributions to medical knowledge. 



After this necessarily brief statement 

 concerning some of the conditions of medi- 

 cal practice in the New England colonies, 

 we are better prepared to appreciate the 

 position and work of those graduates of 

 Yale College in the eighteenth century who 

 became physicians. 



The course of studies at the College was 

 planned rather for the preliminary training 

 of ministers than of doctors, but it fur- 

 nished a classical education, which was 

 then more necessary for the study of med- 

 ical books than it is to-day. There seems 

 to have been at least some interest in the 

 College in medical knowledge, if one may 

 judge from the titles of some of the early 

 theses and from the possession by the College 

 of a human skeleton and 'paintings of the 

 human body skin'd,' as they are inven- 

 toried. President Stiles occasionally deliv- 

 ered a lecture on medicine, and in his re- 

 cently published ' Literary Diary ' he gives 

 an interesting outline of one of these lec- 

 tures, the main headings being, I. Anat- 

 omy ; II. Pathology ; and III. The Metho- 

 dus medendi (one of the sub-headings here 

 being 'Efficacious medicines but few') — 

 sufficiently comprehensive, it may be said, 

 for a single lecture even in those days. 



The success attained by the Yale physi- 

 cians of the eighteenth century indicates 

 that the College then, as ever since, supplied 

 its graduates with a training of mind and 

 character adapted to the circumstances of 

 time and place, and fitting them for the 

 work of life in any field. 



Mainly by the aid of Professor Dexter's 



invaluable two volumes of ' Biographical 

 Sketches of the Graduates of Yale College,' 

 covering the period from 1701 to 1763, and 

 a kind personal communication relating to 

 the remaining classes, I have been able to 

 determine that there were at least 224 

 Yale graduates in course of the eighteenth 

 century who practiced medicine. This fig- 

 ure, which is certainly somewhat below the 

 correct one, is 9.7 per cent, of the entire 

 number of Bachelors of Arts for the same 

 period — a percentage about the same as the 

 correspondingone forthenineteenth centurj'. 



Of the seven graduates in arts from the 

 College in the first two decades of the 

 eighteenth century who became medical 

 practitioners, all, with one exception, were 

 also clergymen, and of the seventy-two 

 physicians graduated in arts in the first 

 half of the century nearly one-fourth were 

 clerical, whereas after this there are only a 

 very few names of clerical physicians. 



All who are familiar with the early colo- 

 nial history of New England know what an 

 interesting class the clerical physicians 

 were. Not a few of them were educated, 

 skilful physicians, who ranked among the 

 leading practitioners and teachers of medi- 

 cine in their day, while others were, on the 

 medical side, scarcely more than ' com- 

 forters of the sick,' as they were sometimes 

 called, rather than active practitioners. 

 One of the earliest and most celebrated of 

 this class of physicians was the Eev. 

 Thomas Thacher (1620-1678), of Boston, 

 the direct ancestor of our own honored 

 and beloved Latin professor of the same 

 name. His name is preserved in ^nedical 

 annals as that of the author of the first 

 solely medical publication in America, a 

 broadside folio which appeared in Boston in 

 1677, and is entitled : ' A brief rule to guide 

 the common people of New England how 

 to order themselves and theirs in the small 

 pocks or measles.' 



But of all those who combined the offices 



