Medicine.
It was an age in which quackery flourished. The regular physicians, though excellent men and highly regarded by the people, depended upon nostrums, and had little medical knowledge; they were in the main "herb-doctors" and "blood-letters." Many of the practitioners were barbers, and others clergymen. "This relation between medicine and theology," writes Dr. Holmes, "has existed from a very early period; from the Egyptian priest to the Indian medicine-man, the alliance has been maintained in one form or another. The partnership was very common among our British ancestors." There were few facilities for the study of medicine in the colonies until after the Revolution. The first medical school in America was established in Philadelphia, about 1760.
77. Occupations.
Domestic manufactures.
Unlike the Southern colonists, New Englanders were dependent on England only for the most important manufactures. Mechanics were sufficiently numerous in every community. The lumber industry was important, and in Connecticut and Massachusetts there was profitable iron mining, which gave rise to several kindred pursuits. There being abundant water-power, small saw and grist mills were numerous; there were many tanneries and distilleries; the Scotch-Irish in Massachusetts and New Hampshire made linens and coarse woollens, and beaver hats and paper were manufactured on a small scale. The people were largely dressed in homespun cloth, and a spinning-wheel was to be found in every farm-house. It was not until after the Revolution, however, that New England manufacturing interests attained much magnitude; the home government, through the Acts of Navigation and Trade (page [104]), had discouraged, as far as possible, American efforts in this direction.
Fisheries.
The fisheries, particularly whale and cod, were an important source of income, those of Massachusetts being estimated, in 1750, at £250,000 per year. Fishers' hamlets, with their great net-reels and drying stages, were strung along the shores. The men engaged in the traffic were hardy and bold, no weather deterring them from long voyages to Newfoundland and Labrador, while whale-fishers ventured into the Arctic seas. From their ranks were largely recruited the superb sailors who made the American navy famous in the two wars with England.
Shipbuilding.
A pinnace, called the "Virginia," was constructed by the Popham colonists in 1607,—the first ocean-going vessel built in New England. Shipbuilding was first undertaken at Plymouth in 1625, and in Massachusetts six years later (1631). By 1650 New England vessels were to be seen all along the coast, and carried the bulk of the export cargoes. Before 1724 English ship carpenters complained of American competition. In 1760 ships to the extent of twenty thousand tons a year were being turned out of American shipyards,—chiefly in New England; and most of them found a market in the mother-country.
Commerce.