Jonathan Chase, Revolutionary War
Colonel from Cornish, and first “founder” of the Cornish-Windsor
Bridge, died in 1800 at age 68. His oldest daughter, Prudence,
married Nathaniel Hall. Prudence was 8 years old when her mother,
Thankful, died and Jonathan remarried Sarah Hall two years later.
Although I researched Ancestry.com, I couldn't find proof that
Nathaniel was related to Sarah, but I still think they were probably
related. Nathaniel apparently was a huge man, weighing around 400
pounds, and Jonathan nicknamed his son-in-law “Tiny Nat”. Rauner
Library at Dartmouth College has a picture of Prudence. It is
copyrighted and I can't publish it here without permission. I don't
really want to bother to get permission, so here is a
link:http://libarchive.dartmouth.edu/cdm/compoundobject/collection/photofiles/id/26806/rec/1.
Prudence and Nathaniel had 9 children. Six were born before Jonathan
died.
Jonathan's next oldest daughter, Mary,
married Ebenezer Brewster. Mary died in 1795 and did not have any
children.
Jonathan's other daughter by Thankful
Sherman also died young. Elizabeth married Dr Nathan Smith when she
was 26 years old and died 2 years later. Elizabeth's sister Sarah,
whose nickname was Sally, was 16 when Elizabeth and Nathan were
married and 18 when Elizabeth died. Two years later, Nathan married
Sally. He was 33 and she was 20.
Nathan Smith was a doctor who had an
active practice in Cornish. He was raised in Chester, Vermont and had
never had much formal schooling. He was educated enough to teach
school, himself, though, and as a very young adult he taught school
in Chester. One day he and a bunch of his friends heard that a man in
their town was going to have his leg amputated. The group went to
watch and Nathan ended up assisting with the operation. As he was
helping the doctor clean up after the surgery, he mentioned to the
doctor that he would like to study medicine. The doctor, Dr Josiah
Goodhue of Putney, who had traveled to Chester specifically to
perform this amputation, told Nathan that it wasn't enough to be able
to read, write, and do arithmetic. In order to be a doctor, he would
have to learn higher level mathematics and about science. Goodhue, a
graduate of Harvard, recommended that Nathan enter the next Harvard
freshman class.
There was no way that Nathan had the
money to travel to Cambridge, Massachusetts to enter Harvard, nor did
his family have the money to pay tuition. Nathan did the next best
thing. He did a course of study with the Reverend Whiting of
Rockingham, Vermont, studying Mathematics, Science and Latin.
Whiting was also a Harvard graduate. Apparently that was enough for
Doctor Goodhue, because when Nathan was 22 years old, and done
studying with Reverend Whiting, he went back to Doctor Goodhue,
knocked on his door, and asked again if he could study with him.
Whiting accepted Nathan as a physician's assistant. This was a three
year apprenticeship in which Dr. Goodhue offered Nathan a home and
medical knowledge in return for his labor.
During this three year apprenticeship,
Nathan's father died and his mother moved to Walpole, New Hampshire.
After his apprenticeship ended and Nathan was ready to start his own
medical practice, he chose to begin his professional life in Cornish.
Probably the proximity to Walpole played a part in his decision, and
it is also possible that he had some prior connections with the Chase
family.
In the late 1700's, doctors earned
about $500 a year, in currency and payment of kind. This is about the
same pay as a skilled laborer would earn, and maybe a little less
than the architects of the Cornish-Windsor bridge. In many
communities, families used the services of the local midwife to treat
the sick way more often than the doctor. Midwives had often completed
more extensive training than doctors, although more informally, and
had much more knowledge of natural and herbal remedies.
The biggest health problems in the
late 18th and early 19th centuries were
communicable diseases, the most deadly being tuberculosis. There
were many serious childhood diseases, cholera infantum, scarlet
fever (our common strep throat), and diptheria being the worst.
Although tuberculosis was the number one killer of adults, adults
also died of influenza, pleurisy and pneumonia. It was an era of
heavy alcohol consumption, with plenty of alcohol related deaths,
both from medical conditions caused by alcoholism and accidents that
happened while people were drunk.
There was no real understanding of
what caused disease, and certainly no understanding of bacteria and
viruses. Many people believed that diseases and deaths from sickness
were God's way of punishing people for not living a good enough life,
or that they were God's way of testing their faith. Others believed
that sickness was caused when the body was assaulted by poisons
(called miasma effluvia) that were released into the air by decaying
matter. This belief was based on the accurate observation that more
people got sick during the hot, humid weather. Of course, many of
the deadly germs were dormant during the cold winter months, but the
cold brought dangers of its own. People did notice the phenomenon of
contagion, and theorized that there were invisible poisons in the
air, called “animalculi”, which was probably the most accurate of
the many theories.
Another theory was that the human
body was adversely affected by temperature, and sickness was caused
by weather that was too hot or too cold. This was prevalent even in
my childhood, when my mother bundled us up before sending us outside
if it was even a little cold, believing that if we got “chilled”
we would be sick. We were also cautioned about playing too hard on a
hot day in case we got “overheated”. People studied the positions
of the stars and the moon in the sky, and many blamed an outbreak of
influenza or other deadly diseases on the way the stars were aligned.
The appearance of a lunar or solar eclipse, or a comet, could cause
a panic.
Medical doctors really know how to
treat or cure many of the diseases that caused people to get sick and
die. Most medical practice revolved around the belief that sickness
involved an imbalance of fluids in the body, and most doctors in that
era treated disease by trying to restore the balance of fluid, often
by bloodletting. Nathan Smith, however, was a surgeon. Surgeons
actually could help people. They could remove tumors, do amputations
(which may not sound very helpful, but usually saved a person's
life), set broken bones, and perform trephination, when they drill a
hole the head of a person who has suffered a head injury to relieve
pressure and prevent permanent brain damage or death. Skilled
surgeons could even remove cataracts from eyes and diseased internal
organs, such as an appendix. Keep in mind that any surgery was
performed without anesthesia. The most popular and renowned surgeons
were noted for their speed in performing operations, because quick
operations lessened the time patients had to spend experiencing the
excruciating pain.
After Nathan had practiced medicine
for two years in Cornish he decided he needed real, formal medical
training. To that end, he belatedly took Dr. Goodhue's advice and
registered at Harvard. When Nathan was a medical student,
instruction took place by lecture only. There was no laboratory
instruction and certainly no lessons using a real human body, either
dead or alive. Nathan graduated from Harvard with a Bachelor's Degree
in Medicine. He did his dissertation on the circulation of blood,
which is a commonplace topic in 2014, but in those days knowledge
about the circulation of blood was cutting edge. The only formal
education Nathan experienced up until then was his time at Harvard.
After he graduated from Harvard, he
returned to Cornish and resumed his medical practice. By this time
he was in his early thirties and it was time to settle down, get
married and start a family. The Chases were the leading family in
Cornish, and Nathan married Jonathan's daughter Elizabeth. Elizabeth
only lived for two years after the marriage. A year or so after she
died, Nathan married Jonathan's next youngest daughter Sarah, who was
nicknamed Sally.
Dr. Nathan Smith's medical saddlebag
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