An Epitome of the History of MedicinePark, Roswell
History
An Epitome of the History of Medicine
Park, Roswell
Medicine -- History
profession, and found their warmest defenders among the ranks of the
clergy. Benjamin Franklin, then only sixteen years of age, joined with
the rabble in opposing the inoculation method. Boylston was threatened
with hanging, and had even to hide himself for a time, he died in 1766.
After the great discovery of Edward Jenner societies were formed for the
promotion of vaccination all over the world. The earliest vaccination
in the United States was performed by Dr. Waterhouse (born 1754, died
1846), who operated upon four of his own children in 1800.
[Illustration: 0300]
It was during the eighteenth century that a number of our best-known
educational institutions were founded in the different colonies,--among
them, Yale College, in 1701; Princeton (College of New Jersey), in 1746;
University of Pennsylvania, in 1749; Columbia (King's College), in
1754; and others, only a little less known. In most of these latter were
established medical departments, but the method of apprenticing students
to physicians was still in general observance, no preliminary education
whatever, as a rule, being demanded. In 1766, however{280}, the
New Jersey Medical Society ordained that no student be taken as
an apprentice by any member of the society unless he had competent
knowledge of Latin and some initiation in the Greek. About the middle of
the century Drs. Bard and Middleton, in New York, and Dr. Cadwallader,
in Philadelphia, began giving lectures in anatomy, while at Newport,
Rhode Island, Dr. William Hunter, between 1754 and 1756,--a near
relative of the famous Hunters of London, and a pupil of the elder
Monro,--gave a course of lectures on human and comparative anatomy. Dr.
William Shippen. Jr. (1736-1808),--a student of John Hunter's,--returned
in 1762 to America, and gave his first course of lectures on anatomy and
midwifery during the years immediately following. His lectures led to
the formation of a Medical Department of the College of Philadelphia,
in 1765, in which lectures were continued regularly until the winter of
1775, when the{281} War of the Revolution interfered. In July of 1776
Shippen was made Chief-Physician of the Continental Army, and in
the following year was elected by the Provincial Congress
Director-in-General of army hospitals. During the latter years of the
war he returned to Philadelphia each winter, and delivered a course
of lectures, shortened by the necessities of the case. Thus he was the
first public teacher of midwifery in this country. He was ably seconded
in his work by Dr. John Morgan (1735-1789),--also a pupil of Hunter and
Monro, who received a prominent army appointment in 1775, but who, two
years later, was unfortunately dismissed on charges{282} subsequently
proved false. Shippen and Morgan were for some time the only professors
in the Medical Department of the College of Philadelphia. In 1768
Kuhn--a pupil of Linnæus--was made Professor of Materia Medica and
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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