Nathan Smith, a Vermont farmer’s son, became a doctor and
started his medical practice in Cornish, New Hampshire, marrying Elizabeth
Chase, Jonathan Chase’s daughter. When
Elizabeth died, Nathan married her sister Sally. Unsatisified with the apprenticeship system
of training doctors, Nathan applied to the Trustees of Dartmouth College for
approval of a medical school and after a year or so delay, the Dartmouth
Medical School was established. Although
not especially lucrative for a doctor who had a steadily growing family, both
Nathan and the medical school thrived, until a court case involving grave
robbery.
Nathan
felt that Dartmouth College was not doing enough to help him procure the
specimens necessary to conduct the dissections he felt were so important a part
of a medical student’s education. He also thought the college should have been
more generous in giving the medical school money for the textbooks and
equipment he needed to conduct his classes. Nathan was a big believer in hands-on
experience in medical training, in an era when most medical instruction
consisted of just lectures. We know that
Dartmouth College was strapped for cash during its first years, but it may also
have been that the trustees felt that Nathan’s methods were ridiculous. Then, there is the inescapable fact that
dissection of cadavers was illegal.
When school was not in session,
Nathan traveled amazing distances treating patients and performing
surgery. It is understandable that Sally
would not want to move households to follow her husband in his endeavors, since
he was all over the place anyway. His
granddaughter-in-law Emily Smith, in her book “The Life and Letters of Dr.
Nathan Smith”, includes a letter dated April 20, 1811. Nathan wrote to his friend
and former student George Shattuck. Nathan starts out, “I intended to spend
this winter in Boston, but in reviewing my affairs found them such as required
my presence at home.” Really? Possibly because his wife was raising eight
children there by herself? For all the
times Mrs. Smith remarks on his tenderness toward his children and his family,
it does not seem very tender to leave them in Hanover and spend the winter in
Boston. In several of his letters to Mr. Shattuck, he describes journeys to
Bath, Coos, Weathersfield, Charlestown, Boston, Merrimack, Concord, and Exeter.
Apparently George was a bill
collector for Nathan, or maybe just his emissary in Boston. In any case, much of Nathan’s correspondence
to George consisted of asking – actually, more accurately, commanding – him to
collect one note or another. He also
used George as a social secretary as well, asking him to ask other people if
they are coming to visit him, giving dates when he is going to be home (not
many), and offering alternate sites for visits in Concord or Boston. Many of
these proposed social visits appeared to involve the collection of money owed –
a “bring me my money and stay for dinner” kind of arrangement. Certainly it was
fair that Nathan collect the money he was owed, especially with a family of
eight children. The arresting thing about these letters is that their tone is
so imperious, and you wonder if Nathan was giving Mr. Shattuck any money for
being his emissary in Boston and southern New Hampshire. My guess is that he did not.
Ill feelings still lingered in
Nathan regarding the court case, and the general difficulties in getting
dissection specimens in rural New Hampshire. The political situation in New
Hampshire was not encouraging to the funding of education. It is interesting to
note that Dartmouth College was petitioning the New Hampshire legislature for
funds. This is why Nathan went to
Concord. He often attended sessions of
legislature to lobby for funding for the medical school. Yale College in New
Haven, Connecticut had been putting out feelers to Nathan, recruiting him to
teach at their newly established medical school and Nathan began leaning in
that direction. He sent both Ryno and
Solon to Yale to medical school, and, in 1812, Yale offered him a position on
the faculty at the medical school.
Before he could leave for Yale, the
Upper Valley was hit by an epidemic of Typhoid Fever, and Nathan, who had
treated patients successfully in many previous outbreaks of typhoid, felt
compelled to stay in Hanover, especially when his wife and three of his
children came down with it.
In West Lebanon, a ten year old boy
was suffering from a bone infection in his leg that he had gotten as a result
of having typhoid. He was in excruciating pain and when his mother called in
their family doctor, the doctor said his leg would have to be amputated. This
type of bone infection is called osteomyelitis in 2014, and is treated with
antibiotics. My nephew had it, and was
hospitalized for two days, then discharged with a fanny pack of IV antibiotics
that he had to wear 24/7 for at least a week.
Nathan had been treating this type
of bone infection for at least two years, by excising the dead bone and
draining the infection from the area. The boy went to school with several of Nathan’s
kids, and his mother, Lucy Smith, (no relation) contacted Nathan and asked him
if he could come and take a look at her son, and hopefully save his leg. It is
unclear whether or not she knew that Nathan was an expert at this kind of bone
infection. It is more likely that she knew he was a very
accomplished physician and surgeon and possibly more able to help her son than
the local doctor who had prescribed amputation.
Nathan came and performed surgery
on Lucy’s son, bringing ten medical students to observe the operation. Often, patients were brought to the medical
school to have operations at the medical school, on a table in the lecture
hall. Probably due to his age and the
amount of pain he was in, Nathan operated at his home. Lucy’s mother described the operation. “ The
surgeons commenced operating by boring into the bone of his leg, first on the
one side where it was affected, then on the other side, after which they broke
it off with a pair of forceps or pincers. Thus they took away large pieces of
bone.” Keep in mind that this whole procedure was accomplished on a ten year
old without anesthesia.
Accounts of Nathan’s operation on
Lucy Smith’s son, in West Lebanon, New Hampshire in 1813 can readily be found
online by googling “Dr. Nathan Smith and Joseph Smith”. The ten year old was Joseph Smith, future
founder of the Mormon religion. The
Mormons consider it very significant that Nathan was the only surgeon in the
country who was performing this procedure, almost one hundred years before it
became standard practice in World War I. They believe that it was God’s divine
intervention that put Joseph in school with Nathan’s children during that
Typhoid Fever epidemic, and thus gave him access to the only doctor who could
save his leg.
After the Typhoid Fever had passed,
Nathan joined his sons at Yale Medical School and began his career at Yale,
again leaving Sally and the rest of the children behind while he established
himself there. A letter from Nathan to Sally, reprinted in its entirety in Emily
Smith’s book, has Nathan yet again missing Sally and the children, promising
never to leave them again. “I fear my absence has been severely felt by you and
the children. For my own part, I have
had a dreary winter of it. You may rest assured that I will never leave you and
the children for so long a time again during my lifetime. I think I will be
able to get home by the middle of April.” In that same letter, he describes a
situation between Solon and a cook in the kitchen. “We have been having some difficulty in the
school between the cooks and the scholars. A cook abused one of the scholars in
the kitchen and the scholars put him under the pump and pumped him, as it is
called. I think, however, it will be settled without difficulty. Solon is one who
helped to pump the cook, but so many assisted in the thing that the blame will
be light on individuals. No doubt the
fact that Solon was Nathan’s son also helped with the “light blame”.
Notwithstanding all the legal difficulties
surrounding dissection, Dartmouth College was loathe to let Nathan go. Oliver Hayward, in his biography of Nathan,
“Improve, Perfect and Perpetuate”,
states that students were drawn to the medical school by the reputation of Dr.
Smith. Most of them hated Hanover
because it was way out in the middle of nowhere, and the weather was miserable
– cold in the winter and hot, humid and buggy in the summer. Dartmouth College
was concerned that the Medical School would not survive the defection of its
founder.
Three years later, Sally and the
kids still had not moved to Connecticut.
Nathan had to return home in 1815 when his daughter Sally died. This was
the first death in the family, and by all accounts it hit Nathan hard.
Regardless, he left Sally in Hanover and returned to New Haven for another
year. In 1816 he went back and gave a
series of well-attended lectures at Dartmouth.
This was the last time he taught in Hanover. Sally and the kids finally joined Nathan in
New Haven in 1817, and Sally gave birth to her last child, a girl, Sally, born
in 1819. Interestingly enough, although
they lived in New Haven at the time, all records at Ancestry.com show that
Sally was born in Cornish, as were all of her siblings but one, who was born in
Hanover. Sally must have returned to
Cornish to have the baby. Since both of
her parents were dead by then, she must have had the baby at a siblings’ house.
Nathan established two more medical
schools, one in Maine and one at the University of Vermont. Although Sally
visited both Maine and Vermont, the move from Hanover to New Haven was the last
one she made. Nathan died in New Haven in 1829 at age 66, of what appears to
have been a stroke. Sally died in Springfield, Massachusetts twenty years later
and was buried in New Haven. She may
have been living with her next youngest son James, at the time, because he is
listed as living in Springfield, Massachusetts in 1850.
None of Nathan’s children lived in
the Upper Valley as adults. The boys
became doctors, the girls all married and had children. Every one of them gave one of their children
“Chase” as a middle name, and most of them had a daughter named “Sally”.
Ezekiel Cushing, the medical student arrested and charged
with grave robbing, went on to become a doctor in Plymouth, Massachusetts. He did die young, at age 38.
Nathan may very well be related to Simeon Ide (see Simeon’s
story in my posts of late fall 2012/ early winter 2013). Nathan’s mother’s
maiden name was Ide, originally from Rehoboth, Massachusetts, as was Simeon’s
family (and mine as well). Simeon and Nathan came from the same area of
Vermont.
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