James Thacher and his influence on American medicine / Henry R. Viets.

Viets, Henry R. (Henry Rouse), 1890-1969.

Date:: [1949]

Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: James Thacher and his influence on American medicine / Henry R. Viets. Source: Wellcome Collection.

3/20

Henry R. Yiets, M.D., Librarian, Boston Medical Library, Boston, Massachusetts. Three years from now you will have the honor of celebrating the centenary of the birth of Walter Reed for whom this lecture is fittingly named. He is a towering figure in American medicine, an Army officer not dulled bv the drab routine but ever to carry the spark of genius, so fully discerned by the far-seeing Welch in thos,e early historic days at the Hopkins. That same spark was to burst forth in brilliant display many years later in the far-off Havana and mark an epoch in the frequentlv tur¬ bulent flow of the advancement of medical knowl¬ edge. Son of an obscure man of God, born in hum¬ ble circumstances in Belroi, Reed became Virginia’s most distinguished physician. When opportunity knocked, he, like Oliver Wendell Holmes, had 'the mind prepared,’ even as Banting, Minot, Fleming, Florey and Trueta in our day. The door to medi¬ cal education must be broad not to screen out ‘the most distinguished’ and Egyptian walls be no bar¬ rier to those qualified to enter. The Reeds of medi¬ cine are among us today and for them, often indis¬ tinguishable in the mass, our efforts must be bent. A Welch may get an inkling of future brightness, as he did with Reed, but most of us must be content with flag at mast and giving our best to those we are privileged to teach. James Thacher, although he did not reach the heights scaled by Walter Reed, made for his time a notable contribution to medical education as a teacher of many boys in his home, an author of the first American textbook of medicine and an his¬ torian who collected for posterity the records of the lives of our medical worthies. In addition, Thacher wrote, according to John Adams, “the most natural, simple, and faithful narration of facts that I have seen in any history of that period [the American Revolutionary War].” Adams was writing in 1824, over forty years after the surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown but, after reading Thacher’s Military Journal today, we would not disagree with Adams’ opinion. Besides his Practice, Military Journal and Medi¬ *The Walter Reed Lecture delivered before the Rich¬ mond Academy of Medicine, February 10, 1948. cal Biography, dhacher wrote six other books, many of them produced at a time when ill health forced him to relinquish partly his extensive practice and embark upon antiquarian and historical endeavors. Some of these books rest in the oblivion of time, only of interest to the keen-nosed collector of ‘pe¬ ripheral medicine’ or to the dusty librarian, worthily holding in her charge every bit of matter surround¬ ing our predecessors so that years later someone like myself will force her to reach into her capacious pocket, dark and gloomy though it be, and bring forth a little known volume, a ‘rare item,’ a long- lost edition, perhaps only to ‘lay a ghost.’ Thacher would have approved of your Academy and library, as he did of the Boston Medical Library, a sprawl¬ ing infant in his day but not unmindful, as you are, of its duty to those who had passed that way before. A Military Journal While serving as a surgeon in the American Revo¬ lutionary War from 1775 to 1783, James Thacher kept a detailed diary, a day-by-day account, en¬ livened with intimate biographical sketches of of¬ ficers in the field. A good picture of the spirit of Washington’s Army, especially under the adverse circumstances of hunger, fatigue and cold, the jour¬ nal also provides detailed descriptions of events almost unequalled by any of his contemporaries. He was a keen observer of the habits of his fellow- soldiers and, for a young country boy untrained in narration, his Journal must be considered a re¬ markable historical document.1 Unfortunately, Thacher failed to give many details of his hospital experiences, except in regard to a smallpox inocu¬ lation, which he carried out on a large scale. Thacher, a young man of twenty-one, fresh from an apprenticeship with Abner Hersey, the leading physician in Barnstable, Massachusetts, where the young Whig was born, became a surgeon’s mate un¬ der John Warren in the provincial hospital at Cambridge, Massachusetts, in July, 1775. War¬ ren, the brother of Joseph Warren, killed on June 17 at Bunker Hill, although only a year older than Thacher, was the senior surgeon to the hospital. Reprint from Virginia Medical Monthly Vol. 76, Pages 384-399, August, 1949.