Life and Medical Discoveries of Samuel Thomson, and a History of the Thomsonian Materia Medica, as Shown in "The new Guide to Health," (1835), and the ... the Famous Letters of Professor Benjamin
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Benjamin Waterhouse was a physician, co-founder and professor of Harvard Medical School.
Background
Benjamin Waterhouse was born at Newport, R. I, one of eleven children of Timothy and Hannah (Proud) Waterhouse. His father, a chair-maker, grandson of Richard Waterhouse who emigrated to Boston in 1669 and later settled in Portsmouth, N. H. , is said to have been judge of the court of common pleas and a member of the royal council of the colony. His mother, Quaker-born in Yorkshire, England, was a cousin of Dr. John Fothergill, an eminent practitioner of London. Influenced by a number of learned Scotch physicians practising at Newport and by the reading of medical books in the library of Abraham Redwood, Waterhouse was soon drawn to medicine. At the age of sixteen he apprenticed himself to Dr. John Halliburton, a surgeon.
Education
At age 21, he left the United States to study medicine in Europe at several notable institutions, such as with Dr. John Fothergill in London, England. He was also educated in Edinburgh at the University of Edinburgh Medical School. He matriculated October 28, 1778 at the Leiden University and received at the same University his medical degree Apr. 19, 1780.
Career
Waterhouse returned to America and settled at Newport in June 1782. Upon the establishment of a medical department at Harvard College in 1783, he, one of the best educated physicians in America, accepted the professorship of the theory and practice of physic, and delivered his Oratio Inauguralis (not published until 1829) the same year. He was closely associated at first with John Warren, the professor of anatomy and surgery, and Aaron Dexter, who held the chair of chemistry and materia medica. In 1786 he published the first part of A Synopsis of a Course of Lectures, on the Theory and Practice of Medicine. On July 6, 1791, he delivered a discourse at Concord, Massachussets, on The Rise, Progress, and Present State of Medicine (1792) which, with its emphasis on experimental investigation, reveals Waterhouse as a man far in advance of his time. In 1799, however, came the most important event in his life. In the beginning of this year he received from John Coakley Lettsom, the London physician, a copy of Edward Jenner's An Inquiry into the Causes and Effects of the Variolae Vaccinae (1798). Waterhouse undoubtedly knew of the previous work of another Boston physician, Zabdiel Boylston, who in 1721 had used inoculations from smallpox pustules to set up a mild form of the disease in an unprotected patient and thus prevent a more serious attack in the future. Since inoculation smallpox was sometimes fatal, the importance of Jenner's cowpox vaccinations lay in the fact that only a mild disease (vaccinia) resulted, although the degree of protection against smallpox was equally great. Waterhouse published a brief account of Jenner's work in the Columbian Centinel, March 16, 1799, with the queer title, "Something Curious in the Medical Line, " and a few weeks later at a meeting of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Boston showed Jenner's book to the members and told of the probable value of the work. After considerable delay, Waterhouse received from England some vaccine in the form of infected threads, and immediately (July 8, 1800) used it on his son, Daniel Oliver Waterhouse, then five years old. As the vaccine pustule went through the various stages described by Jenner, Waterhouse went on to vaccinate another child, a servant boy. The next step was to see if the children were susceptible to smallpox; at Waterhouse's request William Aspinwall, head of the smallpox hospital in Brookline, inoculated one of the supposedly protected children with smallpox, choosing the servant boy for the experiment. Although the boy's arm became infected with smallpox, there was not the slightest trace of the general disease. Waterhouse, who had followed his own advice and left "the flowery path of speculation", wrote of this: "One fact, in such cases, is worth a thousand arguments". He continued to vaccinate others with cowpox with equally good results. His first report, A Prospect of Exterminating the Small Pox, was published within six weeks, August 18, 1800. It contains a clear account of his work, with the logical conclusion that cowpox protected the body from the infection of smallpox. The news of his work soon spread, but unfortunately vaccination was not taken up exclusively by medical men; impure cowpox matter, sometimes mixed with smallpox, was used by "stage-drivers, pedlars, and in one instance the sexton of a church". A serious epidemic occurred, a number of people died, and a feeling of resentment against Waterhouse was soon evident. He finally requested (May 31, 1802) the board of health of Boston to make a complete investigation. An experiment with nineteen persons was successfully carried out by a committee of seven outstanding practitioners, including Waterhouse, and the committee concluded that "the cox-pox is a complete security against the small-pox". From 1802 on, with the aid of many physicians and public-minded citizens, Waterhouse made vaccination known throughout the neighboring states. President Thomas Jefferson had about two hundred persons vaccinated with vaccine sent him by Waterhouse. In November 1802 Waterhouse was able to publish part II of A Prospect, giving in orderly arrangement the details of his two-year study, and including letters from Jefferson, Benjamin Rush, Jenner, and others. During the next few years he wrote many articles on vaccination for newspapers, particularly the Columbian Centinel. It was through his insistence on maintaining the purity of vaccine virus that vaccination was finally placed upon a secure scientific basis in the United States. In 1810 the main facts of his previous publications were abstracted in a pamphlet, Information Respecting the Origin, Progress, and Efficacy of the Kine Pock Inoculation. In honor of his work, Waterhouse was made a member of various scientific societies in the United States, Great Britain, and France. With his most important contribution to medicine accomplished, Waterhouse turned to his other interests. His lecture of November 20, 1804, to the medical students at Harvard College was printed in 1805, Cautions to Young Persons Concerning Health. Shewing the Evil Tendency of the Use of Tobacco with Observations on the Use of Ardent and Vinous Spirits. This was Waterhouse's most popular book; five editions were published in America, one in London, one in Geneva (in French), and one in Vienna (in German). He felt that the morals of the students of his time had deteriorated, and that the increase in consumption and nervous disorders was the result of intemperance. It probably was a salutary warning at a time when such a caution was needed. In addition to his position in the Harvard Medical School, Waterhouse gave lectures on natural history in general and on mineralogy and botany in particular, first in Rhode Island College (later Brown University) at Providence, R. I (1784 - 86), and from 1788 on at Cambridge. A cabinet of mineralogy was sent to him from London by Lettsom and given to Harvard College. His lectures were first published in the Monthly Anthology (1804 - 08), as a pamphlet in 1810, and finally, in part, as The Botanist (1811). As early as 1782 he suggested the formation of a humane society in Rhode Island similar to those already active in Europe and in 1785 drew up plans, with Dr. Henry Moyes of Edinburgh, for the Humane Society of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. After some friction with the other founding members, he gave a discourse, June 8, 1790, on The Principle of Vitality, showing the importance of long-continued artificial respiration. By 1810, however, his relations with his colleagues and the governing board of Harvard College had become strained. The Harvard Medical School at Cambridge lacked clinical facilities; the only patients available for demonstration were in the Boston almshouse, then considered a long distance from Cambridge. Waterhouse was eminently satisfied with his course of didactic lectures at Cambridge and bitterly opposed a move to establish the school in Boston near the contemplated Massachusetts General Hospital, a suggestion made by his more energetic colleague, John Warren. The younger men of the time, particularly John Collins Warren and James Jackson, 1777-1867, sided with Warren. Waterhouse, "little given to the arts of clinical instruction", endeavored to establish a rival school of medicine in Boston, to be known as the College of Physicians; when this failed, he attempted to damage his colleagues by publishing "false, scandalous, and malicious libels upon the other professors" . He was forced to resign in 1812. He had been connected with the United States Marine Hospital since 1808, when he wrote the first Rules and Orders for the hospital at Charlestown, Massachussets, and in 1813 Madison appointed him medical superintendent of all the military posts in New England, a position which he held until 1820. The excellent character of his work can be judged by A Circular Letter, from Dr. Benjamin Waterhouse, to the Surgeons of the Different Posts (1817), which concerns the diagnosis and treatment of dysentery. With an assured income for the time being, Waterhouse turned, except for one publication, An Essay Concerning Tussis Convulsiva (1822), towards general literature. An anonymous work is attributed to him, unlike any of his other writtings; the book is a romantic narrative, A Journal of a Young Man of Massachusetts (1816), the story of a surgeon captured by the British in the War of 1812 and confined to Dartmoor Prison. There is every evidence that the book was a first-hand account, written by the doctor of a small merchant ship, but Waterhouse may have edited or even augmented the manuscript, as he did with another young man's book published some years later. In 1831 he published An Essay on Junius and his Letters, in which he assigned the authorship of the letters to William Pitt, Earl of Chatham. His last literary undertaking was the editorship of John B. Wyeth's Oregon (1833), which he published as a deterrent to western emigrations. Issued when he was nearly eighty, the rather senile moralizing of Waterhouse in this book stands out in marked contrast to the fresh, buoyant narrative of the younger author. Waterhouse lived in his home on Waterhouse Street, Cambridge, until his death at the age of ninety-two. Burial took place at the Mount Auburn Cemetery.
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Politics
Waterhouse was an ardent patriot, although never an active participant in political affairs.
Personality
His appearance in younger days may be judged by the Stuart portrait; when he was an older man Holmes noted "his powdered hair and queue, his gold-headed cane, his magisterial air and diction".
Connections
He married, first, on June 1, 1788, Elizabeth, the daughter of Andrew and Phoebe (Spooner) Oliver. There were four sons and two daughters. Elizabeth Oliver Waterhouse died in 1815, and on September 19, 1819, Waterhouse married Louisa, daughter of Thomas and Judith (Colman) Lee. She survived him, without children, and died in 1863.