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  • Dr. Benjamin Waterhouse: A Life in Medicine and Public Service (1754-1846)
  • Trudy Eden
Philip Cash . Dr. Benjamin Waterhouse: A Life in Medicine and Public Service (1754-1846). Sagamore Beach, Mass.: Boston Medical Library & Science History Publications / USA, 2006. xi + 516 pp. $56.00 (0-88135-264-0).

Although of the right age and from the regional hotbed of the revolutionary movement, Benjamin Waterhouse does not, as so many others, fit comfortably into the political category of "founding father." Indeed, for much of his ninety-two years he was more adept at being outside or against groups than in harmony within them—a result of circumstance, postrevolutionary politics, and personality. As Philip Cash tells it, this contrariness made Waterhouse a founding father of a different sort, being the first physician in the United States to vaccinate for smallpox at the end of the eighteenth century and the first professor of the theory and practice of physic at Harvard. This is an outdated characterization that does not work, and it obscures more timely issues of which the Waterhouse story is a treasure trove.

Perhaps because of his subject's contrary nature, Cash is at odds with his subject. He truly wants Waterhouse to be "the Jenner of America," an honorific that implies innovation and heroism in addition to method and promotion. Indeed, the organization of the book and the chapter titles alone would lead you to that conclusion. However, while Waterhouse employed and diffused Jenner's technique, often with infected threads received from Jenner himself, he was not the discoverer the term implies. Furthermore, his competitive fee structure, his professional secrecy, his unclear role in a maladministration of the vaccine that resulted in several deaths, and his unending self-promotion undermine whatever heroism he may have displayed. Cash dutifully and carefully reports these and other aspects of Waterhouse's life, but he offers little comment on them; rather than synthesize them and present the reader with his biographical interpretation, he reports mostly the details, quite often through long quotes. General readers will find this method difficult because the details are numerous; in many cases they seem pointless to the biography as a whole, and confuse and distract rather than inform.

Readers familiar with medical historiography who can organize the material around pertinent issues, however, and researchers looking for raw material will rejoice. This book has been exhaustively researched and meticulously noted, and in this capacity it has great strength in the history of smallpox, medical practice, and medical education in the United States. Much of the current historiography of smallpox in early America centers on the eighteenth-century epidemics among colonists or Native Americans and on the inoculation controversy in Boston in the 1720s. Vaccination, on the other hand, has received little treatment. Waterhouse's experience indicates that its acceptance was not ready, and for reasons that one might not suspect. Yes, prospective vaccinees were fearful, and effective vaccine at times could not be procured or stored successfully, but political, territorial, and monetary squabbles also played a significant part.

The same is true for Waterhouse's practice and professorship. Cash's excellent reportage exposes the function of patronage in early American medical practice, [End Page 202] from Waterhouse's first apprenticeship as a teenager in Newport, Rhode Island, to alliances with John Fothergill in London as a young man, and then with Edward Jenner, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams as an adult. It also reveals patronage's underside, for as much as these associations helped Waterhouse get his degree, his professorship, and his patients, they also attracted enemies who were more than capable of undermining the benefits. Similarly, Cash's careful telling of the political wranglings of medical educators—including one notable episode of a petty dispute over custodianship of the minerals cabinet at Harvard—reveals an important (albeit not very pretty) aspect of medical education in early America: that much time, effort, and money were wasted on trivialities that had little to do with medicine and much to do with personal promotion.

Trudy Eden
University of Northern Iowa
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