th the best light of science that he
could obtain.

The influence of the reform he introduced must have been more or
less felt in this country, but not much before the beginning of the
eighteenth century, as his great work was not published until 1675, and
then in Latin. I very strongly suspect that there was not so much to
reform in the simple practice of the physicians of the new community, as
there was in that of the learned big-wigs of the "College," who valued
their remedies too much in proportion to their complexity, and the
extravagant and fantastic ingredients which went to their making.

During the memorable century which bred and bore the Revolution, the
medical profession gave great names to our history. But John Brooks
belonged to the State, and Joseph Warren belongs to the country and
mankind, and to speak of them would lead me beyond my limited--subject.
There would be little pleasure in dwelling on the name of Benjamin
Church; and as for the medical politicians, like Elisha Cooke in the
early part of the century, or Charles Jarvis, the bald eagle of Boston,
in its later years, whether their practice was heroic or not, their
patients were, for he is a bold man who trusts one that is making
speeches and coaxing voters, to meddle with the internal politics of his
corporeal republic.

One great event stands out in the medical history of this eighteenth
century; namely, the introduction of the practice of inoculation for
small-pox. Six epidemics of this complaint had visited Boston in the
course of a hundred years. Prayers had been asked in the churches for
more than a hundred sick in a single day, and this many times. About a
thousand persons had died in a twelvemonth, we are told, and, as we may
infer, chiefly from this cause.

In 1721, this disease, after a respite of nineteen years, again appeared
as an epidemic. In that year it was that Cotton Mather, browsing, as
was his wont, on all the printed fodder that came within reach of
his ever-grinding mandibles, came upon an account of inoculation as
practised in Turkey, contained in the "Philosophical Transactions." He
spoke of it to several physicians, who paid little heed to his story;
for they knew his medical whims, and had probably been bored, as we say
now-a-days, many of them, with listening to his "Angel of Bethesda," and
satiated with his speculations on the Nishmath Chajim.

The Reverend Mather,--I use a mode of expression he often employed whe