In 1749 Parliament voted to reimburse Massachusetts to the amount of nearly one million dollars, for expenses incurred in the expedition against Louisburg and this money was used to redeem outstanding paper bills at the rate of ten in paper to one in cash. The next year old tenor ceased to be lawful money amid general rejoicing and much doggerel verse.
"Now old tenor fare you well,
No man such tattered bills will tell,
Now dollars pass and are made free,
It is the year of jubilee."
CHAPTER XIII
Herb Tea and the Doctor
At a meeting of the Massachusetts Bay Company held in London on March 5, 1628-29, it was proposed that the Company "Intertayne a surgeon for the plantation" and one Abraham Pratt was sent over soon after. He lived in Roxbury, Charlestown and Cambridge. While returning to England with his wife in the fall of 1644, their ship was wrecked on the coast of Spain and both were drowned. At the same meeting the Company selected a barber-surgeon, Robert Morley, to go to New England and practice his calling on "aney of the Company that are planters or there servants." In those days a barber-surgeon employed himself in pulling teeth, bleeding and cupping.
Earlier than this, however, Doctor Samuel Fuller had come over in the Mayflower and was of the greatest service to the sickly foundation at Plymouth. When John Endecott's wife lay dying at Naumkeak (Salem), in 1629, Doctor Fuller was hastily sent for, and the next year he was called to Matapan (Dorchester) where he "let some twenty of these people blood: [and] had conference with them till I was weary."[67] A month later he was at Charlestown writing "I here but lose time and long to be at home, I can do them no good, for I want drugs, and things fitting to work with." Three years later he was dead of an infectious fever.
A large portion of the physicians in the early days of the Colony were Puritan ministers who had studied medicine in England in anticipation of removal to New England, as a hasty preparation for such necessities as might arise. Each practised in his own flock and Cotton Mather in his Magnalia (Book III, Chap. 26), speaks of this union of the two professions as an "Angelical Conjunction." When Rev. Michael Wigglesworth died in 1705, his weeping parishioners in the town of Malden, erected a stone to mark his grave and on it may still be read the words
"Here lies intered in silent grave below
Maulden's physician for soul and body two."