ake as a movement of wind shut up in the
pores and bowels of the earth.

Of medicine the Puritans knew little and practised less. They swallowed
doses of weird and repelling concoctions, wore charms and amulets, found
comfort and relief in internal and external remedies that could have had
no possible influence upon the cause of the trouble, and when all else
failed they fell back upon the mercy and will of God. Surgery was a
matter of tooth-pulling and bone-setting, and though post-mortems were
performed, we have no knowledge of the skill of the practitioner. The
healing art, as well as nursing and midwifery, was frequently in the
hands of women, one of whom deposed: "I was able to live by my
chirurgery, but now I am blind and cannot see a wound, much less dress
it or make salves"; and Jane Hawkins of Boston, the "bosom friend" of
Mrs. Hutchinson, was forbidden by the general courts "to meddle in
surgery or physic, drink, plaisters or oils," as well as religion. The
men who practised physic were generally homebred, making the greater
part of their living at farming or agriculture. Some were ministers as
well as physicians, and one of them (Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes is sorry
to say) "took to drink and tumbled into the Connecticut River, and so
ended." There were a number of regularly trained doctors, such as John
Clark of Newbury, Fuller of Plymouth, Rossiter of Guilford, and others;
and the younger Winthrop, though not a physician, had more than a
smattering of medicine.

The mass of the New Englanders of the seventeenth century had but little
education and but few opportunities for travel. As early as 1642,
Massachusetts required that every child should be taught to read, and
in 1647 enacted a law ordaining that every township should appoint a
schoolmaster, and that the larger towns should each set up a grammar
school. This well-known and much praised enactment, which made education
the handmaid of religion and was designed to stem the tide of religious
indifference rising over the colony, was better in intention than in
execution. It had little effect at first, and even when under its
provisions the common school gradually took root in New England, the
education given was of a very primitive variety. Harvard College itself,
chartered in 1636, was a seat of but a moderate amount of learning and
at its best had only the training of the clergy in view. In Hartford and
New Haven, grammar schools were founded under the b