History of the Medical Society of the State of New York / by James J. Walsh.

  • Walsh, James J. (James Joseph), 1865-1942.
Date:
1907
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: History of the Medical Society of the State of New York / by James J. Walsh. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    33/216 (page 29)
    of the eastern colonies also practiced physic. Two of them, of the name of Winthrop, appear to have been particularly celebrated. One of them was Governor of Massachusetts, the other of Connecticut and New Haven. Of the latter, Cotton Mather says: ‘He was furnished with noble medicines, which he most charitably and generously gave away upon all occasions/ He was a member of the Royal Society of London, and some of his communications are to be found in their transac¬ tions.” Notwithstanding the adventitious circum¬ stances that gave many of the early physicians dignity and prominence, and undoubtedly added to the estimation in which all practitioners of medicine were held, it readily can be understood that they represented only a very few of those who practiced medicine, and that the standing of most of the others was, indeed, low. Anyone who will recall the position occupied by the apothecaries who represented the physicians of that day in rural England, about the middle of the eighteenth century, will have forcibly im¬ pressed upon him the very low station which the medical practitioner in country places, at least, occupied at this time. Thackeray gives pictures of at least one of them that is neither creditable to the personal standing of the men themselves, nor to their professional dignity. There is no doubt, however, that the novelist had plenty of historical details as the groundwork of his picture. It is not surprising, then, to find that Dr. Beck deprecates the condition of medical practice in the American Colonies during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The wonder of it is that he was large-minded enough to see that it had the good qualities of its defects and that our forefathers are by no means so much to blame for the abuses that inevitably crept in at that time, and that, indeed, if we compare conditions at that time with what has come to be the state of affairs in our more cultured nineteenth and twentieth