m their meadows, that sets the
whole neighborhood shaking with fever and ague.

The Pilgrims of the Mayflower had with them a good physician, a man of
standing, a deacon of their church, one whom they loved and trusted, Dr.
Samuel Fuller. But no medical skill could keep cold and hunger and
bad food, and, probably enough, desperate homesickness in some of the
feebler sort, from doing their work. No detailed record remains of what
they suffered or what was attempted for their relief during the first
sad winter. The graves of those who died were levelled and sowed with
grain that the losses of the little band might not be suspected by the
savage tenants of the wilderness, and their story remains untold.

Of Dr. Fuller's practice, at a later period, we have an account in a
letter of 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