Grave Robbing at Dartmouth

Nathan Smith, the founder of Dartmouth Medical School, started his medical practice in Cornish, New Hampshire.  His wife was Sally Chase, daughter of Jonathan Chase, Revolutionary War colonel and founder of the Windsor-Cornish Bridge.  For several years, Nathan had two residences.  He rented a room in Hanover to be close to Dartmouth, but also maintained a household in Cornish, where Sally was raising their children.

                In 1803, Dartmouth College offered Nathan a raise if he would move his family to Hanover and establish a permanent residence there. Maybe they felt that Nathan was unable to fully attend to his the teaching and management of the medical school with a family so far away in Cornish.  By 1803, he had four children in Cornish, Solon, age 8; Ryno, age 7; Sally, age 4; Gratia, age 1, and just before the end of the year, on December 30, Sally had another baby, a girl, Mary.

                It was another two years before Sally and the kids moved to Hanover with Nathan.  In the meantime, it appears that they moved from a house Sally’s father owned in Cornish to a house in Windsor, where the brood of five children was joined by nine medical students. Sally’s father Jonathan died in 1801 and the house was probably sold after his death.  When he died, Sally and Nathan inherited some land in Cornish and Vermont, but they did not inherit the house they had been living in.

                We know that Sally moved to Hanover in 1805 because there are surviving bills of sale that show that she bought feather beds, chairs, desks, tables, cutlery and dishes in Hanover to furnish her house in Hanover, leading Nathan’s biographer Oliver Hayward to believe that prior to their move to Hanover, not only were they living in Jonathan’s house, but that most of their household furnishings were owned by him as well.     

                Nathan strongly believed that a medical school education should include the dissections of human bodies. Human dissection was illegal during this time, and subjects for dissection had to be smuggled into medical schools.  In large cities, it was easier to obtain bodies than in rural areas like the Upper Valley.  When possible, Nathan tried to have bodies sent up from Boston, but this was difficult and expensive.  Sometimes he had no alternative but to resort to grave robbing, punishable with a $2,000 fine, two years in prison and fifty lashes.

                Certainly Nathan did not rob graves himself.  Unlike the graverobbing depicted in “Tom Sawyer”, however, he didn’t hire criminals to do it, either.  He hired one of his medical students. The situation got very dicey around the time Sally finally moved to Hanover. Nathan had made arrangements to send a medical student to Boston to pick up the body of a young boy and bring it back to Hanover for dissection.  The student, Ezekiel Cushing, heard that a boy of about that same age had recently died in Enfield, and thought that the job would be quicker and more lucrative if he just went to Enfield, dug up the recently deceased body, and brought it back to Hanover.  He convinced several of his buddies to go with him, and the deed was done.

                On the way back to Hanover, carrying the body he had just taken from its grave in the back of a wagon under some hay, Ezekiel was so rattled when he paid a toll at a tollhouse that he left his wallet behind.  The wallet contained a letter about the grave of a 10 year old boy in Enfield. The man at the tollhouse notified the sheriff who went to check on the grave, and of course, found that the body was missing.

                The sheriff came knocking at the doors of the medical school. He had a warrant and searched the place. The students had been warned and quickly hid the body in a closet, but during the search, the sheriff opened the door to the closet and the body fell right out on top of him. Of course, during all of this, Nathan was nowhere to be found. When the sheriff found the body, the guys that were there convinced him not to do anything by threatening that the entire student body would “tear him limb from limb”, according to  Oliver Hayward in his book “Improve, Perfect and Perpetuate”, his biography of Nathan. One of the students was carrying a pistol, and he made sure the sheriff saw it.

 Although the sheriff did not take any actions that night, Ezekiel was charged with grave robbery and went to trial at the courthouse in Haverhill, New Hampshire, where he swore under oath that he never procured any human bodies for dissection, nor did Nathan Smith ever request him to procure a subject from Boston. Ezekiel never served time or received any consequences for grave robbery (or perjury).  Nathan Smith was questioned at the trial – and almost certainly committed perjury along with his student – and was never charged or convicted of procuring bodies or carrying out dissections.

The obvious question is – how and why did Nathan and his students get caught robbing graves and get away with it? I thought at first that the sheriff found the body in the closet but couldn’t prove who had taken it.  When I reread the story, I realized that the wallet tied Ezekiel with the body, and provided a date and even a time.  It would seem like an open and shut case.  Did Nathan bribe someone?  Were the courts just really sympathetic toward grave robbers and medical science?  I can hardly imagine that was the case, especially with a jury made up of New Hampshire farmers. Was the sheriff really as intimidated by a bunch of medical students as Hayward portrays in his book? 

Teaching Medicine at Dartmouth

                The founder of the Dartmouth Medical School, Nathan Smith, started his medical practice in Cornish.  His wife was the daughter of Jonathan Chase, Revolutionary War Colonel and founder of the Cornish-Windsor bridge.  Doctors were not plentiful in the North Country at the time, and as Nathan’s reputation as an excellent doctor and surgeon grew, he found that he often had several apprentices working with him.  Nathan had studied at Harvard, and considered the apprenticeship system to be vastly inferior to a high quality formal medical education.  He approached the trustees of Dartmouth College with a proposal to establish a medical school there, and after a couple of years of waiting, during which time Nathan went to Scotland and London adding to his own medical education, the trustees approved the Medical School.

                Nathan had an attitude toward the practice of medicine that differed from that of other learned doctors of his day.  He taught his students to carefully examine their patients and pay particular attention to what they were experiencing. He believed that good nursing care was very important in the treatment of a sick person, and that the wise physician takes advantage of every avenue of treatment while being careful to watch for side effects.  During this time, medical knowledge was rudimentary at best, and there were many treatments commonly used on patients that were useless, and some that even harmed them and made them less likely to recover.  Nathan believed that “watchful waiting” was often the best course of action.  Other doctors commonly practiced “heroic measures” like bleeding and purging.  Before the medical school was established, Nathan had dealt with an outbreak of Typhus at Dartmouth College without losing a single one of his patients by opening the windows of the patients’ rooms, wrapping them in wet sheets and giving them lots of fluids.  In his biography of Nathan, Oliver Hayward, in his book “Improve, Perfect and Perpetuate” states that he believes that Nathan’s isolation on the frontier may have saved him from engaging some of the practices popular with more established doctors elsewhere.  Harvard Medical School had more than one doctor on the faculty, and these doctors had been established as medical eminences for a long time. They hesitated to stray from the accepted teachings and medical beliefs.  Nathan was younger, in charge pretty much in a vacuum, and had been practicing medicine in the howling wilderness where necessity was often the mother of invention.

                While Nathan was in Europe, he attended many classes and lectures that featured dissection of bodies.  These experiences made him committed to dissection of real human subjects and laboratory chemistry experiments as part of the education at Dartmouth Medical School.  The problem was, that dissection of human bodies was illegal in America at this time, and because of this, bodies were hard to come by.  It was especially difficult to obtain cadavers in rural New Hampshire and Vermont. In cities, medical schools often used the unclaimed bodies of paupers, or prisoners who had died in jail. There were more cemeteries in cities, and the cemeteries were much bigger, and a disturbed grave would not be noticed as quickly than it would be in the rural Upper Valley, where everyone noticed everything.  If a body was dug up in Hanover, everyone in the whole town would know about it immediately. 

                If a person was caught and convicted of graverobbing, they would receive a $2000 fine, 2 years in prison and 50 lashes.  There are multiple indications that graverobbing was rampant in the Upper Valley at this time.  Norwich cemetaries were a prime spot for grave robbers, and in the early town reports in Cornish there is documentation of the “problem of grave robbing” being discussed at town meeting, and stern warnings given by town officials toward potential grave robbers. Of course one wonders if Nathan Smith was behind the grave robberies in Cornish and whether or not his Chase relatives knew.

                In 1804, the Dartmouth Trustees voted to give Nathan a raise, on the condition that he would move to Hanover permanently, and bring his family with him.  Before this, Nathan had been maintaining two households.  He rented a couple of rooms in Hanover, but Sally and his sons remained behind in Cornish.  One assumes that the Trustees thought that Nathan was spread too thin, and he would do a better job if he could live with his family at Dartmouth.  The question is, was it financial considerations that kept the family in Cornish, or Sally’s disinclination to move to Hanover?  The family was living right across the road from her parents, in a house that her father owned.  With Nathan being so busy teaching medical school and carrying on his medical practice, she probably preferred to stay by her parents and siblings.  After Jonathan died in 1801, she may have been more amenable to a move to Hanover that she would have been before he died.  By all accounts, Jonathan was very close to his children and his grandchildren, in a way that Nathan may very well not have been.

Windsor County Court September 2

Nathaniel Watkins, DOB 11/29/86, pled not guilty to a charge of his first DUI, in Chester on August 24

Michelle Cronin, DOB 9/13/74, pled guilty to a charge of unlawful trespass in Springfield on May 26

Paul Smith, DOB 8/17/90, pled guilty to a charge of his first DUI, in Sharon on August 24

Willie Cook, DOB 8/4/64, pled not guilty to a charge of driving with a suspended license in Harford on July 6

Michael DePalma, DOB 7/22/59, pled not guilty to a charge of negligent operation of a motor vehicle on July 10 in Windsor

Jacob Cardente, DOB 9/18/90, pled not guilty to charges of his first DUI, and leaving the scene of an accident with property damage on August 3 in West Windsor

Steven McDermott, DOB 3/30/95, pled not guilty to his first DUI in Hartford on August 26

Windsor County Crime Online

 

Joshua Crowson, age 23, of Springfield:

http://weathersfieldvermontnews.blogspot.com/2014/08/burglary-unlawful-trespass-grand-larceny.html

 

Michael Gray, age 21, of Pomfret; Hannah Potter, age 20, of Barnard:

http://www.thevermontstandard.com/2014/08/state-police-report-pomfret-burglary/

 

Hannah Potter, age 20, of Barnard:

http://www.thevermontstandard.com/2014/08/state-police-report-barnard-forger/

 

Jordan Rogers, age 21, of Sharon:

http://www.thevermontstandard.com/2014/08/state-police-report-sharon-woman-cited-for-conditions-of-release/

Nathan Smith and Dartmouth Medical School

Dr. Nathan Smith of Cornish, New Hampshire was the founder of Dartmouth Medical School. The new medical school attracted students from all over northern New England.  Some had experienced formal medical training already and were a little put off by Nathan’s country ways.  Nonetheless, once they got to know him they realized he was fully qualified to be one of two faculty at the new medical school, and that it was unusual to receive training that was both high quality academically and highly practical.

The first thing students noticed about their lecturer was that he dressed in an “unkempt country style” and that his mannerisms and lecturing style were unpolished, to say the least.  Medical school professors were not usually so shabbily attired. Oliver Hayward’s biography of Nathan, titled “Improve, Perfect and Perpetuate”, quotes one of his students, William Tully’s diary, in which Tully stated that “Dr Smith’s lectures were full of colloquial phrases, pithy and inelegant”. In one lecture, Smith said that “it was a pleasant thing to be called Doctor and sent for and consulted, but if anything was the matter with his own family, he sent for old Mrs. Dewey, Deacon Dewey’s wife.” In 2014, we prefer our college professors to have a sense of humor, but it appears that this was not what medical students were looking for at the turn of the 19^th century.

The two first students that earned Bachelor’s degrees in Medicine from Dartmouth Medical School were both from Vermont.  Joseph Gallup was from Woodstock and Levi Sabin from Rockingham. It appears that, at least in the beginning, most of the recipients of degrees from Dartmouth Medical School were apprentices of Dr Smith as well as students.  Three 1799 graduates, Nathan Noyes, Daniel Adams, and Abraham Hedge were all Nathan’s apprentices.  Although he was busy giving lectures and keeping the medical school going, he also continued in his medical practice, often bringing several apprentices or students with him to see patients. Hayward cites student diaries describing trips from\Hanover to Barre and Corinth, Vermont and Walpole, New Hampshire from Hanover.  If the patients presented an interesting case, these same students would often hear the patient’s situation described and discussed in lecture the next day. This sounds familiar to us as a case study, but back in the late 1700’s this was a novel educational practice, and certainly not one that Nathan had experienced himself as a student, at least not in formal training, although it may very well have been common in the meetings and lectures of the London Medical Society.

There was a good reason for Nathan’s shabby clothing. Although he was very busy, he certainly was not getting rich. He was keeping two households going. When he was formally invited to become part of the Dartmouth faculty and the medical school was firmly established, his position became much more stable than that of a private lecturer, and he rented some rooms in Hanover.  Sally did not come to Hanover with him, however.  She stayed on in Cornish, with her family of three.  In 1799 Solon was four, Ryno was 2 and Sally had a new baby, a girl who was also named Sally.  Although he collected some doctor’s fees, the majority of his time was spent at the college.  Most students paid their tuition in promissory notes, which were often slow in being paid.  Nathan himself was slow to pay his own tuition. One of his Harvard professors, Robert Waterhouse, ended up suing him to get his money, and another, John Warren, had to wait twenty years. 

Nathan had a new outlook on practicing medicine that involved a careful examination of the patients, and a thorough assessment of what they were experiencing.  He also stressed the importance of good nursing care during a sickness. He believed that a wise physician should take advantage of every healing mechanism while watching for side affects.  Hayward believes that isolation on the frontier might have saved Nathan from engaging from new practices that were accepted and popular on the eastern seaboard, but were actually useless and in some cases harmful.

Nathan’s lectures were full of practical instruction and were always changing, in comparison to Harvard’s medical lectures, which had been the same for twenty years.  Dr Smith’s case-study lecturing technique was brand-new, and although it seemed less polished and contained less medical theory than what some students were used to, they grew to appreciate the practical aspects of his instruction. Nathan stressed the healing power of nature, waiting and cleanliness, not especially popular medical theories in the late 1700’s.  Again, being isolated in the wilderness may have had some benefit for some of his patients.  He had significant success with his patients using the methods and medicine he had on hand in the north country woods – time, fresh air, fresh water and cleanliness.  He did not hesitate to criticize or contradict accepted medical theories when he thought they were wrong, and admitted that there were many diseases doctors could not cure, especially cancer. In Nathan’s granddaughter-in-law’s book “The Life and Letters of Nathan Smith”, much of Nathan’s writing, both speculative and instructional, relates to cancer, and you have to wonder if his mother or father or his first wife Elizabeth died of cancer, although the fact that Elizabeth died so young makes that unlikely.

Nathan’s lecture notebooks from his days at Dartmouth survive, and Hayward quotes them extensively in his book.  “Medical Jurisprudence” must have been an interesting lecture. In that lecture, he talked about wounds, contusions, malpractice, infanticide, abortion, rape, concealed birth and poisoning. It is always surprising to see these issues mentioned hundreds of years ago.  We think of those times as innocent, safe, and without crime or immorality, but then evidence appears to disabuse us of those notions. It would be fascinating to see those notebooks and maybe get some insight on what Nathan really thought about those topics. 

Nathan had his own brushes with the law in regards to medical science, and that is a story for another day.

 

Windsor County Court August 26

Jonas Rogers, DOB 2/16/81 pled not guilty to charges of false information and petit larceny in Springfield on May 4

Paul Shea, DOB 11/3/73, pled not guilty to charges of DUI and possession of cocaine in Hartford on August 6

Allen Swasey, DOB 8/16/89, pled not guilty to a charge of his 3^rd DUI in Hartford on July 27

Benjamin Millay, DOB 10/04/84 pled not guilty to a charge of embezzlement that occurred in Windsor from January to June of 2014.  Read more about these charges here: http://www.rutlandherald.com/article/20140902/THISJUSTIN/309029996

Keith Pratt, DOB 6/21/82, pled not guilty to a charge of domestic assault in Hartford on June 9

Christine Harris, DOB 7/17/65, pled not guilty to a charge of disorderly conduct/fight, in Hartford on July 14.  She was also charged with disorderly conduct/noise on July 21 and July 29.

Travis Noble, DOB 4/24/92, pled not guilty to his first DUI, leaving the scene of an accident, giving false information to a police officer, and false alarm, in Barnard on September 25 of 2013

Amber White, DOB 8/22/92, pled not guilty to a charge of retail theft in Windsor on June 27

Andrew Beattie, DOB 6/15/88, was charged with his first DUI, operating with reckless or gross negligence and operating with excessive speed, in Hartford on August 16

Brendon Collins, DOB 4/12/86, pled not guilty to a charge of possession of heroin in Hartford on January 31

Ryan Robley, DOB 2/2/85, pled not guilty to possession of heroin in Hartford on June 25.  Read about these charges here: http://vtstatepolice.blogspot.com/2014/06/possession-of-heroin6-25-14hartford.html

Joshua Crowson, DOB 3/8/91, pled not guilty to charges of burglary while carrying a deadly weapon, and grand larceny, in Ludlow from July 8  through July 11

Patrick Howe, DOB 5/16/93, pled not guilty to charges of disorderly conduct/obstructing traffic in South Royalton on July 13. 

Zachary McNeil, DOB 1/16/92, pled guilty to a charge of driving with a suspended license in Ludlow on July 16

Nicholas Yazzie, DOB 7/4/88, pled not guilty to a charge of his first DUI, in Hartford on July 25

 

Windsor County Crime Online:

Sara Hall, age 31, of Woodstock - https://www.facebook.com/pages/Woodstock-Vermont-Police-Department/101654599936569

Donald LaRock, age 45, of Stockbridge - http://vtstatepolice.blogspot.com/2014/07/violation-of-stalking-order-stockbridge.html

 

Windsor County Court August 19

Brian Blow DOB 10/1/84 was charged with possession of narcotics and driving with a suspended license in Hartford on May 27.  He was also charged with operating with a suspended license in Sharon on May 27

Read more about these charges here: http://www.ourherald.com/news/2014-06-05/Communities/State_Police_Arrest_Four_For_DLS_and_Speeding.html

Sharon McGranahan, DOB 1/26/71, was charged with her first DUI, in Hartford on July 7

Tammy Getty, DOB 11/8/68, pled not guilty to charges of disorderly conduct/fight and violating conditions of release in Springfield on July 24.  She was also charged with aggressive domestic assault with a prior conviction in Springfield on May 12 and a failure to appear on May 13

Kirtlen Bacon, DOB 9/15/62, pled not guilty to a charge of resisting arrest, unlawful trespass, and possession of marijuana in Hartford on June 30

Emily Endrusick, DOB 12/10/93, pled guilty to false pretenses or false tokens in Springfield on April 1 Read more about these charges here: ftp://50.241.92.213/Prepress/Library/Eagle%20TImes/2014/June%20Tear%20sheets/20/A4.pdf 

John Doran, DOB 9/3/67, pled guilty to a charge of his first DUI, in Hartford on August 7

Brandon Simpson, DOB 9/15/68 pled not guilty to charges of his fourth or subsequent DUI, test refusal and driving with a suspended license in Woodstock on August 8.  Read more about these charges here: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Woodstock-Vermont-Police-Department/101654599936569

Katie Schulenberger, DOB 8/28/87, pled not guilty to charges of her first DUI, operating a vehicle with gross negligence resulting in injury, her second DUI, operating with a suspended license, and two charges of reckless endangerment in Springfield on June 22.

You can read more about these charges here: http://www.unionleader.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20140623/NEWS03/140629589&source=RSS&template=printart

 

Windsor County Crime Online

Courtney Griffin, age 19, in Springfield http://www.vermonttoday.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/RH/20101129/NEWS02/711299951

 

 

Nathan Smith was an important doctor in the Upper Valley in the late 1700’s.  His practice encompassed an area with a fifty mile radius.  He was married to Sally Chase, Jonathan Chase’s daughter, and they lived right across the road from Colonel Chase in Cornish. As the years went by, Nathan provided medical services to families on both sides of the Connecticut River, through smallpox and typhus outbreaks.  He also saw the gamut of common medical emergencies, setting broken bones and performing surgeries.

Nathan usually had an apprentice working with him.  Sometimes he had two students working in his practice, gaining their medical training the same way he did.  Nathan went to Harvard because he was dissatisfied with the level of expertise he gained from his apprenticeship, and he wanted more for his students as well. He felt strongly that every state should have a medical school that could provide a high quality medical education.

Since 1769, Dartmouth College had been providing higher education to Upper Valley students (all men – women did not go to college) and it seemed logical to Nathan to approach the nearest college with a plan to establish a medical school. When he met with the trustees of Dartmouth, they were not overly enthusiastic about the idea.  For one thing, Dartmouth was broke.  In 1795 they only had 100 students and struggled to pay their professors.  The trustees told him to come back in a year when the college might be financially better off and more able to consider the proposal.

Nathan decided that he needed further education.  Although Sally was pregnant with their second child, he decided to go to the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. Nathan was always invested in increasing his medical knowledge, but it is also likely that he thought that Dartmouth would take him more seriously if he had been to Edinburgh.

Nathan’s letters home to Sally, reprinted in his granddaughter-in-law’s book “The Life and Letters of Nathan Smith” show that he missed his wife and little boy and that he was worried about them. He writes, “ I am sure I shall ever be happy if I live to return and find you and Solon alive and well. Do be careful of our dear little son.” He doesn’t mention Sally being pregnant or any anxiety over the unborn baby.  It is hard know what to make of this.  Does he not know Sally is pregnant?  Did people in that day just not mention pregnancy in their correspondence? 

In her book, Emily Smith says that Nathan took comfort in knowing that Sally and Solon would be well cared for by Sally’s mother and father (Jonathan and Sally Chase).  Certainly the elder Chases looked after their daughter and grandson, but one wonders what they thought about the situation. Nathan and his family lived right across the road from the Chases, in a house that Jonathan owned. Things were different in those days, but it is easy to believe that at least Sally’s mother was at the very least annoyed that her daughter was left alone and pregnant.

As much comfort as Nathan took from the fact that Sally’s parents were right nearby, he was still homesick and worried about them.  Another letter says,

“Tho' I am every day surrounded with new and interesting scenes and am treated with great kindness and attention by the people here, yet my thoughts continually turn on you and our dear little son, whose name I cannot write without shedding tears on it. I imagine a thousand evils ready to befall him. I see him every night in my dreams and often wake myself by attempting to grasp him, but he always eludes my fond embrace and leaves me to mourn his absence. Do my dear, If he be still living, and I dare not think otherwise, do, I say, watch over him with maternal care, kiss him for me a thousand times each day and tell him that his papa is coming soon." In an era when infant deaths were all too common, it was perfectly reasonable that Nathan was worried about Solon.  In an era when maternal deaths were even more common, it would have been even more reasonable for him to worry about Sally and the unborn baby, making one wonder again if he knew that Sally was pregnant.

The well-being of his family was not Nathan’s only concern. Money was always an issue.  Nathan needed money for medical books, supplies, and medical equipment, as well as for food, lodging and the fare for the voyage.  Records show that he wasn’t always prompt in repaying his debts, waiting 25 years to pay back one of the people he owed. Oliver Hayward’s biography of Nathan, “Improve, Perfect and Perpetuate”, cites several instances of Nathan being slow to pay his bills. 

There is no evidence that Nathan ever matriculated and actually took courses at the College in Edinburgh, although he did attend lectures there. In his letters home, he mentions that he was disappointed in the quality of the lectures he attended. He soon discovered that the medicine’s star was rising over London, and he left Edinburgh to spend some time in London before he went home to Cornish. While he was in London, he toured the London hospital, observed some dissections on cadavers, and was nominated to and joined the Medical Society of London.

When he returned home to Cornish in September of 1797, both Sally and Solon were fine.  Nathan met his second son Nathan Ryno, called Ryno by his family, who was four months old by the time Nathan got home. There is a story, recounted in both Smith’s book and Hayward’s biography, about Nathan’s homecoming. Apparently Sally borrowed three or four neighbor babies the same age as Ryno, lined them all up with her own son and challenged Nathan to identify which one was his. Legend says that Nathan picked correctly, saying that it was easy, he just picked the prettiest baby.

As soon as he returned, Nathan returned to Hanover and Dartmouth. He didn’t wait the trustees to approve the establishment of a medical school, but started giving private lectures on his own, instructing students on various medical theories and techniques. This is much like what he experienced with the London Medical Society, which sponsored various lectures rather than offering education through an established   The difficulty of the trip soon led him to board in Hanover, leaving Sally and the boys in Cornish and coming home when the weather, the roads and his schedule permitted.

school. He traveled back and forth from Cornish to Hanover, riding horseback on poor roads, across unreliable bridges, sometimes crossing streams when bridges were out.

A painting of Dr Smith on horseback, owned by Darmouth College

 

In 1798 the trustees of Dartmouth finally approved the establishment of a medical school and Nathan became a member of the faculty at Dartmouth. He asked his friend and student Lyman Spaulding to be the lecturer in chemistry.  Together, the two made up the entire faculty of the medical school.  In 1800, Nathan lists 19 Seniors and 16 Juniors who attended his lectures for that school year. The medical curriculum included Theory and Practice of Physic; Chemistry, accompanied by actual     experiments (Nathan’s words); and Anatomy and Surgery, accompanied by dissections if subjects can be legally obtained. The fee for Anatomy and Surgery was $50, chemistry cost $23 and Theory and Practice of Physic cost $17. Nathan’s lectures were popular with the students.  According to journals of his students quoted by Hayward, Nathan spoke from experience, added anecdotes from his country practice and even sometimes used humor.

Nathan finally succeeded in getting a medical school established in the north country, so that his students could have a high-quality, formal education in the medical field instead of relying only on apprenticeship as training to become doctors.