830 



SCIENCE. 



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



The importance of the services of Yale 

 graduates as surgeons and surgeons' mates 

 in the French and Indian war and the Rev- 

 olutionary war is not to be measured only 

 by the passing mention which I find it pos- 

 sible to give to them here. I have found 

 the names of ten graduates who served in a 

 surgical capacity in tlie former war, headed 

 by the doughty clerical physician, Timothy 

 Collins (1718), the first Yale army surgeon. 



In 1776 the General Assembly of Con- 

 necticut appointed a committee of eighteen 

 of the leading physicians of the State to ex- 

 amine candidates for the positions of sur- 

 geons and surgeons' mates in the Continent- 

 al Army, and some idea of the standing of 

 Yale graduates then in medical practice in 

 Connecticut may be gained by the facts that 

 this Committee was headed by Alexander 

 Wolcott and contained ten graduates of the 

 College. 



The earliest Yale graduate who held a 

 commission in the American Revolution 

 was a physician, Joshua Babcock of the 

 class of 1724, Major General of the Rhode 

 Island militia. He had walked the hos- 

 pitals in London in 1730, being the first 

 graduate of the College to study medicine in 

 Europe, and for nearly twenty-five years 

 was an active practitioner in Rhode Island. 

 Mr. Henry P. Johnston's book, ' Yale and 

 Her Honor Roll in the American Revolu- 

 tion,' gives the records of twenty-three 

 graduates who served as surgeons or sur- 

 geons' mates in this war, and of six other 

 physicians who were officers in the army. 



The first bestowal of the degree of Doctor 

 of Medicine in America was by Yale Col- 

 lege in 1723, when Dr. Daniel Turner, a 

 well-known London physician and volumin- 

 ous medical writer received the honorary 

 degree. The first American medical de- 

 gree in course was given by the College of 

 Philadelphia, now the University of Penn- 

 sylvania, in 1768. The first graduate of 

 Yale College to receive a medical degree in 



course was John Augustus Graham of the 

 class of 1768, who was graduated bachelor 

 of medicine from Columbia in 1772, and 

 the first to be admitted to the doctorate 

 of medicine in course was Winthrop Sal- 

 tonstall of the class of 1793, M.D. Colum- 

 bia, 1796. 



There are certain directions in which 

 Yale graduates during the eighteenth cen- 

 tury especially contributed to the improve- 

 ment of medical conditions in this country, 

 an improvement everywhere slow and well 

 marked only after the Revolution. 



The Yale physicians of the eighteenth 

 century, with a few not very important 

 exceptions, which I have mentioned in a 

 note,* were trained at home and were 

 thrown in unusual degree upon the results 

 of their own experience. While in the main 

 their practice is not known to have differed 

 from that which prevailed at the time, there 

 is evidence of some local peculiarities. 

 There developed early in Connecticut that 

 special interest in the indigenous materia 

 medica which, transmitted in direct succes- 

 sion from Jared Eliot, through Benjamin 

 Gale, Jared Potter and Eneas Munson, 

 became a distinguishing characteristic of 

 Eli Ives and William TuUy, the professors 

 of materia medica and therapeutics in the 

 Yale Medical Institution in its early years. 

 This contributed to a less violent system of 

 treatment of diseases than was customary 

 in those days. Even in early colonial days 

 a mild treatment of fevers prevailed in New 

 Haven, according to Hubbard, who in writ- 

 ing of this town in his History of New 

 England recorded that " The gentle con- 

 ductitious aiding of nature hath been found 

 better than sudden and violent means of 

 purgation or otherwise ; and blood-letting, 

 though much used in Europe for fevers, 

 especially in the hotter countries, is found 

 deadly in this fever, even almost without 



* The notes accompanying this address are omitted 

 from this publication. 



