Elisha Bartlett, M. D., Etc.
Born in Smithfield, Rhode Island, October 6, 1804. His parents, Otis and Waite Bartlett, were highly respectable members of the "Society of Friends." Their son, whose early education was under the auspices of this Society, possessed all the unostentatious virtues which characterized that sect. At the "Friends' Institution" in New York, under the celebrated teacher, Jacob Willett, he obtained a highly finished classical education. He subsequently attended medical lectures in Boston and Providence and graduated as M. D. at Brown University, Providence, in 1826. Soon after graduation he spent a year pursuing medical studies under distinguished professors in Paris, France, and in classical Italy.
In 1836, he was elected as the first mayor of the town of Lowell; was re-elected at the end of his first term, and afterward, in 1840, was honored by election to the Legislature of Massachusetts. A statesman and not a politician, he soon abandoned political life for the more congenial one of a medical teacher.
[89]"In 1828, he was offered the chair of Anatomy in the Medical School at Woodstock, Vermont, which honor he declined.
"In 1832, he was appointed to a Professorship in the Medical School at Pittsfield, Massachusetts, which he held for several years. He also held a chair one year in the Medical Department of Dartmouth College, and for one year in Baltimore.
"In 1841, he was called to the chair of Theory and Practice of Medicine in the Medical Department of Transylvania University, which he occupied for three years with ability and success."[90]
After a visit to Europe he again returned, in 1846,[91] to the Transylvania Medical College, teaching in the same chair for another three years.
"He subsequently delivered a course of medical lectures in the Medical School at Louisville, giving also summer lectures at Woodstock, Vermont, and other places—his instruction being highly appreciated by his colleagues and most acceptable to his students.
"At length he was called to an important professorship in the College of Physicians and Surgeons of New York. Here he continued for three years, when, compelled by failing health, he abandoned the position to retire to his paternal acres in Smithfield—to die, after a long and lingering illness, on July 19, 1855."
His disease—partial paralysis of the lower extremities, with torturing neuralgia and finally softening of the brain, the result of lead poisoning, caused—as he believed, and as he informed the writer—by the use of water which had passed for a considerable distance through leaden pipes.
The beautiful and sterling traits of the character of Doctor Bartlett are most happily portrayed by the distinguished medical professor and poet, Oliver Wendell Holmes, in the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, August 16, 1855, from which we make a few extracts, viz:
"Hardly any American physician was more widely known to his countrymen, or more favorably considered abroad, where his writings had carried his name. His personal graces were known to a less extensive circle of admiring friends.... To them it is easy to recall his ever-welcome and gracious presence. On his expanded forehead no one could fail to trace the impress of a large and calm intelligence.... A man so full of life will rarely be found so gentle and quiet in all his ways.... The same qualities which fitted him for a public speaker naturally gave him signal success as a teacher. Had he possessed nothing but his clearness and eloquence of language and elocution, he could hardly have failed to find a popular welcome.... He had a manner at once impressive and pleasing, a lucid order which kept the attention and intelligence of the slowest hearer, and attractions of a personal character always esteemed and beloved by students.... Yet few suspected him of giving utterance in rhythmical shape to his thoughts or feelings. It was only when his failing limbs could bear him no longer, as conscious existence slowly retreated from the palsied nerves, that he revealed himself freely in truest and tenderest form of expression. We knew he was dying by slow degrees, and we heard from him from time to time, or saw him always serene and always hopeful while hope could have a place in his earthly future ... when to the friends he loved there came, as a farewell gift, ... a little book with a few songs in it—songs with his whole warm heart in them—they knew that his hour was come, and their tears fell fast as they read the loving thoughts that he had clothed in words of beauty and melody.
"Among the memorials of departed friendships we treasure the little book of 'songs,' entitled Simple Settings in Verse for Six Portraits from Mr. Dickens' Gallery, Boston, 1855—his last present, as it was his last production."