In colonial times there was little regulation of medical practice, although an ineffective law was passed in 1649. Any one might come into a town and announce himself as a physician and if able to cure patients of their maladies, his success was assured. Several unfortunate failures, however, would seriously effect his standing. As a natural result quacks appeared and disappeared in all the larger towns.
In the seventeenth century, and later, there were two classes of medical practitioners of which one prescribed vegetable substances only, together with a free use of the lancet, and followed the teachings of Galen, the Greek physician. The other school followed the doctrines of Paracelsus and prescribed for the most part mineral preparations, and oftentimes were styled "chemists." Of course there was bitter rivalry between the two schools, each maintaining so far as possible, a superstitious mystery concerning their profession. There were few regular graduates from any recognized medical school. Until after the Revolution most practitioners gained their scanty store of medical knowledge by studying with some family physician and in the homely school of experience. Dr. William Douglas, a young Scotchman, began to practice in Boston in 1716. In 1721 he wrote "we abound with Practitioners, though no other graduate than myself. We have fourteen Apothecary shops in Boston. All our Practitioners dispense their own medicines.... In general the physical practise in our colonies is so perniciously bad that excepting in surgery and in some very acute cases, it is better to let nature under a proper regimen take her course than to trust to the honesty and sagacity of the practitioner. Our American practitioners are so rash and officious that the saying in Ecclesiasticus may with much propriety be applied to them, 'He that sinneth before his Maker let him fall into the hands of the physician.'"[68]
Governor John Winthrop was versed in medicine and his son, John, Jr., and his grandson Wait Winthrop, both were proficient in the profession. With Winthrop came Richard Palgrave and William Gager, both physicians, and two years later arrived Giles Firman, Jr., whose father was "a godly man, an apothecary of Sudbury in England." Giles, Jr., studied at the University of Cambridge and later settled at Ipswich, Mass., where he practiced medicine, but found it "a meene helpe" and later studied theology and eventually was ordained rector of Shalford, co. Essex, England.
Toward the end of the century there were two physicians practicing in Boston, Dr. Thomas Oakes and Dr. Benjamin Bullivant, of whom Dunton, the London bookseller gossiped in his "Letters Written from New England."[69]
Of Oakes he wrote that—
"His wise and safe Prescriptions have expell'd more Diseases and rescu'd Languishing Patients from the Jaws of Death, than Mountebanks and Quack-Salvers have sent to those dark Regions."
Concerning Dr. Bullivant he commented that—
"His Skill in Pharmacy was such, as rendered him the most compleat Pharmacopean, not only in all Boston, but in all New England ... to the Poor he always prescribes cheap, but wholesome Medicines, not curing them of a Consumption in their Bodies, and sending it into their Purses; nor yet directing them to the East Indies to look for Drugs, when they may have far better out of their Gardens."
Doctor John Clarke, said to have been a younger son of a good family in the north of England, with a collegiate education, and late of London, was granted a four-hundred acre farm in the town of Newbury, in January, 1638, and September 28th, following, the town also granted that