146 SOME AMERICAN MEDICAL BOTANISTS 



tleton Medical College, graduating in medicine 

 from Middlebury College in 1822. While 

 studying he tutored in Latin, Greek and the nat- 

 ural sciences — the latter with Professor Eaton, 

 of Van Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, at Troy, 

 New York. Soon after graduating, the Secretary 

 of War, John C. Calhoun, sent him a commission 

 as assistant surgeon in the United States army. 

 The responsibility of this position rapidly de- 

 veloped his self-reliance, so that he was soon 

 made full surgeon. During his fifteen years of 

 army service he was stationed for the first eight 

 years in the yet unbroken wilderness of the terri- 

 tory of Michigan. 



Life at the frontier posts was not exactly lux- 

 urious. To read a list of the things deemed 

 " necessaries " for army surgeons to-day makes 

 one wonder how those of Pitcher's time ever sur- 

 vived. His friend, Dr. J. L. Whiting, summoned 

 in 1823 to a sick garrison in Saginaw, gives a 

 little glimpse of outpost life: 



" I found the whole garrison sick, with one or 

 two exceptions, and Dr. Zina Pitcher, the surgeon 

 in charge, the sickest of the lot. He was com- 

 pletely broken up. He had some one hundred 

 and twenty souls, old and young, sixty enlisted 

 men, with officers, laundresses and children, 

 under charge, and all of them sick but one, with 

 one of the most abominably distressing fevers 



