o drink and tumbled
into the Connecticut River, and so ended. One was not only doctor, but
also schoolmaster and poet. One practised medicine and kept a tavern.
One was a butcher, but calls himself a surgeon in his will, a union of
callings which suggests an obvious pleasantry. One female practitioner,
employed by her own sex,--Ann Moore,--was the precursor of that intrepid
sisterhood whose cause it has long been my pleasure and privilege to
advocate on all fitting occasions.

Outside of this list I must place the name of Thomas Wilkinson, who was
complained of, is 1676, for practising contrary to law.

Many names in the catalogue of these early physicians have been
associated, in later periods, with the practice of the profession,
--among them, Boylston, Clark, Danforth, Homan, Jeffrey, Kittredge,
Oliver, Peaslee, Randall, Shattuck, Thacher, Wellington, Williams,
Woodward. Touton was a Huguenot, Burchsted a German from Silesia,
Lunerus a German or a Pole; "Pighogg Churrergeon," I hope, for the honor
of the profession, was only Peacock disguised under this alias, which
would not, I fear, prove very attractive to patients.

What doctrines and practice were these colonists likely to bring, with
them?

Two principal schools of medical practice prevailed in the Old World
during the greater part of the seventeenth century. The first held to
the old methods of Galen: its theory was that the body, the microcosm,
like the macrocosm, was made up of the four elements--fire, air, water,
earth; having respectively the qualities hot, dry, moist, cold. The body
was to be preserved in health by keeping each of these qualities in its
natural proportion; heat, by the proper temperature; moisture, by the
due amount of fluid; and so as to the rest. Diseases which arose from
excess of heat were to be attacked by cooling remedies; those from
excess of cold, by heating ones; and so of the other derangements of
balance. This was truly the principle of contraries contrariis, which
ill-informed persons have attempted to make out to be the general
doctrine of medicine, whereas there is no general dogma other than this:
disease is to be treated by anything that is proved to cure it. The
means the Galenist employed were chiefly diet and vegetable remedies,
with the use of the lancet and other depleting agents. He attributed the
four fundamental qualities to different vegetables, in four different
degrees; thus chicory was cold in the fourth de