Footnotes

Footnotes can be a bountiful source of additional information and may spark curiosity in entirely new directions.  For example, see footnote 13 of Philip Cash’s "The Professionalization of Boston Medicine":

13. In March 1761, Silvester Gardiner, then the most distinguished physician in Boston, offered to construct a private inoculation hospital on a remote part of the Common near where he had earlier built a hospital for the British fleet in New England waters, but nothing came of it. In 1763, Thomas Bulfinch, Jr., Joseph Gardner, and Joseph Warren, who only recently had finished his training with James Lloyd, joined in an unsuccessful effot to secure permission to build a private inoculation hospital in or near Boston [______] Silvester Gardine." To the Freeholders and Other Inhabitants of the Town of Boston, in Town Meeting Assembled, March, 1761, Massachusetts Historical Society Proceedings, ser. 1, 4 (1858-1860), 324-328.

 

Questions

1. What was the contagious disease that prompted the need for an inoculation hospital in 1761?

2. Why do you think Gardiner, Bulfinch, Gardner and Warren were unsuccessful in securing permission to build a private inoculation hospital?

3. Specifically, where in the Common was the hospital for the British Fleet located? How long did it last?

Philip Cash, in "The Professionalization of Boston Medicine, 1760-1803" reports that there were fourteen physicians who were practicing in Boston in 1760: Thomas Bulfinch, Jr.; Benjamin Church, Jr.;  John Clark IV; Nyott Doubt; Silvester Gardiner; Joseph Gardner; James Lloyd; Thomas Mather; James Pecker; John Perkins; Nathaniel Perkins; William Lee Perkins; John Sprague; and Miles Witworth, Sr.

Question

1. From this list, name the physicians that had helped administer to the needs of the poor.