Probably the only medical work published in America during the seventeenth century was A Brief Rule to Guide the Common People of New England how to Treat Them-selves and Others in the Small-pocks or Measels. This was printed and sold in 1677, by John Foster, of Boston. It was printed upon one side of a single sheet in double columns, and described both of these diseases as due to the blood endeavoring to recover a new form and state.
The old English distinction between physician and surgeon was for many years quite generally preserved, but could not persist, because of the different conditions under which men practiced. During this century, also, a number of midwives made excellent practitioners,—among them the wife of Dr. Fuller, one of the May Flower pilgrims. Those colonial days, however, seem to have been free from the ravages of itinerant specialists and charlatans, who so abundantly infested Europe at the time. It is also to the everlasting credit of the American profession that it took no part in the horrible delusions and scandalous transactions connected with the Salem witchcraft.
By the beginning of the eighteenth century the population of the United States was about three hundred thousand whites; by the end of the century it had increased to a total of about four millions. During this century a larger proportion of educated medical men came from abroad and settled in various parts of the country, while the Colonial and the Revolutionary Wars offered ample opportunity for the development and study of military medicine and surgery. Commerce between the two continents increased; communication became more free, and the people of the Old World and the New were constantly brought into closer relation. The most lively medical controversy of the century was, probably, that excited over the introduction of vaccination against small-pox. In previous sketches I have had to intimate that the greatest enemy of the medical profession in time past has been the clergy. In this particular instance, however, it was to the Rev. Cotton Mather, of Boston, that the profession is largely indebted for the favor with which the new method was received in this country. In 1721 he called the attention of various American physicians to the method, then in vogue in Turkey, of inoculation with virus from the active disease. Dr. Boylston, of Brookline, Mass., who settled in Boston, corresponded with members of the British Royal Society and finally determined to put the method to actual proof. In 1721 he inoculated his own son with the virus of natural small-pox, and within the next year had inoculated two hundred and forty-seven persons, of whom about two per cent, died of the disease; while, of nearly six thousand persons attacked by the disease in the natural way, more than fourteen per cent. died. In spite of this, the man and the method were violently attacked by the people and the 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.
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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, 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 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 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 Botany; and Benjamin Bush, a year later, was given the Chair of Chemistry. The commencement of this institution occurred in 1768, when the degree of M.B. was given to seventeen graduates. In 1779 political reasons led to the abolition of the College of Philadelphia, the University of Pennsylvania taking its place. Ten years later the former institution was restored, and in 1791 the two institutions were united. The present Medical Department of the University of Pennsylvania is, therefore, the legitimate continuation of the first medical school in America.
