his to Governor Bradford, dated June, 1630. "I have been to
Matapan" (now Dorchester), he says, "and let some twenty of those people
blood." Such wholesale depletion as this, except with avowed homicidal
intent, is quite unknown in these days; though I once saw the noted
French surgeon, Lisfranc, in a fine phlebotomizing frenzy, order some ten
or fifteen patients, taken almost indiscriminately, to be bled in a
single morning.

Dr. Fuller's two visits to Salem, at the request of Governor Endicott,
seem to have been very satisfactory to that gentleman. Morton, the wild
fellow of Merry Mount, gives a rather questionable reason for the
Governor's being so well pleased with the physician's doings. The names
under which he mentions the two personages, it will be seen, are not
intended to be complimentary. "Dr. Noddy did a great cure for Captain
Littleworth. He cured him of a disease called a wife." William Gager,
who came out with Winthrop, is spoken of as "a right godly man and
skilful chyrurgeon, but died of a malignant fever not very long after his
arrival."

Two practitioners of the ancient town of Newbury are entitled to special
notice, for different reasons. The first is Dr. John Clark, who is said
by tradition to have been the first regularly educated physician who
resided in New England. His portrait, in close-fitting skull-cap, with
long locks and venerable flowing beard, is familiar to our eyes on the
wall of our Society's antechamber. His left hand rests upon a skull, his
right hand holds an instrument which deserves a passing comment. It is a
trephine, a surgical implement for cutting round pieces out of broken
skulls, so as to get at the fragments which have been driven in, and lift
them up. It has a handle like that of a gimlet, with a claw like a
hammer, to lift with, I suppose, which last contrivance I do not see
figured in my books. But the point I refer to is this: the old
instrument, the trepan, had a handle like a wimble, what we call a brace
or bit-stock. The trephine is not mentioned at all in Peter Lowe's book,
London, 1634; nor in Wiseman's great work on Surgery, London, 1676; nor
in the translation of Dionis, published by Jacob Tonson, in 1710. In fact
it was only brought into more general use by Cheselden and Sharpe so late
as the beginning of the last century. As John Clark died in 1661, it is
remarkable to see the last fashion in the way of skull-sawing
contrivances in his hands,--to say nothing