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1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 [First [66], Lines: —— 0.0pt ——— Normal PgEnds: [66], chapter 4 }An End to Pain & Suffering Mayor Josiah Quincy could take great pride that his extensive program of urban renewal and restoration had transformed Boston, he boasted, into one of the cleanest and healthiest cities in the United States. Members of the city’s elite establishment had undertaken successful efforts to lessen crime, reduce poverty, improve conditions for the homeless, modernize the prisons, and make inroads against the debilitating effects of public drinking. But it was in the improvement of medical care and health services for the residents of the city that Boston made a significant contribution to urban development and enhanced its reputation as a progressive city during the early nineteenth century. During colonial times, American physicians had little formal education, and the science of medicine itself was even more backward in the New World than it was in Europe. Most aspiring physicians were not trained in colleges or in hospitals; they usually apprenticed themselves to some established physician for four or five years, until it was time to hang out their shingles and set up practices of their own. Diagnoses were often inaccurate and confused, and many disease patterns were not clearly identified. Even large outbreaks of illnesses were not always recorded, although the dramatic onslaughts of diseases like smallpox and yellow fever never failed to leave their devastating effects behind them in towns and villages throughout the land. To add to this problem, new colonists coming in from Europe were extremely susceptible to dysentery and malaria, as well as influenza, pleurisy, and pneumonia. In treating their patients, colonial doctors often relied upon older forms of treatments such as bleeding and purging, and in North America many borrowed some herbs and remedies from Native American medicine men. The use of the local cinchona bark in the Colony of Virginia, for example, proved remarkably effective in reducing mortality from malaria there. During the course of the eighteenth century, conditions in the medical profession saw a distinct improvement, although in 1721, of the ten An End to Pain & Suffering { 67 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 [67], Lines: ——— 0.0pt ——— Normal PgEnds: [67], physicians practicing in Boston only one actually held a medical degree, and it has been estimated that, as late as the time of the Revolution, only 400 of the 3,500 practitioners in America held medical degrees. Even then, however, most efforts to deal with medical problems centered around quarantining vessels and visitors, regulating the butchering of animals, seeing to the cleaning of streets, yards, and privies, and administering inoculations during periods of epidemics of yellow fever and smallpox. In the course of the century, however, there was an increase in the number of American physicians who were wealthy enough to travel to England or Scotland for a medical education, and by the end of the colonial period two medical schools had been established in America—the Medical School of Philadelphia , founded in 1765 and affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania, and the medical department of King’s College (now Columbia University) in New York, established in 1767. Two institutions were clearly not sufficient to supply formal medical training in New England, however, and so, in September 1782, corrective measures were taken, thanks in great measure to the influence of John Collins Warren, a colonial physician, son of Dr., Joseph Warren, and brother of the late Revolutionary hero, Dr. Joseph Warren, who had fallen at the Battle of Bunker Hill. Under young Warren’s direction, plans were adopted for the creation of a medical school at Harvard College, with the original faculty consisting of three young Bostonians: John Collins Warren himself (age twenty-nine), who would head up the program as Professor of Anatomy and Surgery; Benjamin Waterhouse (age twenty-nine), originally from Newport, Rhode Island, who had studied at London and Edinburg before joining the Harvard faculty, who would serve as Professor of the Theory and Practice of Physics; and Aaron Dexter (age thirty-three), who was appointed Professor of Chemistry and Materia...

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