Elihu Hubbard Smith was an American physician, author, and editor. He projected the first American medical journal, the Medical Repository.
Background
Smith was born on September 4, 1771 at Lichfield, Connecticut, United States, the son of Dr. Reuben Smith, a Yale graduate and a prominent and public-spirited citizen of Litchfield, Connecticut, and Abigail (Hubbard) Smith.
His American ancestry went back to William Smith, who settled in Wethersfield, Connecticut, about 1644, and to George Hubbard of Hartford, Connecticut, born in England in 1601.
Education
He entered Yale in 1782. Only a youth of fifteen, at graduation, he was sent for two years' further study at the academy at Greenfield Hill, Connecticut, under Dr. Timothy Dwight, the elder, later president of Yale.
He next returned to Litchfield for two years' medical study with his father, supplemented by attendance on the medical lectures of Dr. Benjamin Rush in Philadelphia during the winter and spring of 1790-91.
Career
At seventeen he had written, among other things, a group of five sonnets that are nearly the earliest extant in American literature.
With Joseph Bringhurst, Jr. he carried on for several months during 1791 in the Gazette of the United States a fanciful verse correspondence modeled on that of Robert Merry and Mrs. Hannah Parkhouse Cowley. As a practising physician at Wethersfield from the fall of 1791 to the spring of 1793, he became associated with the literary group at Hartford, which then comprised Richard Alsop, David Humphreys, and Theodore Dwight, and his fellow physicians Lemuel Hopkins and Mason Fitch Cogswell. To the "Echo" series of satiric skits produced by the group between 1791 and 1800, and published in the American Mercury (Hartford), Smith contributed one number, "Extracts from Democracy, an Epic Poem, by Aquiline Nimblechops, " and unidentified portions of others.
Withdrawing from Wethersfield in the spring of 1793, he spent several happy months at Litchfield in the company of Brockden Brown, who may have assisted him in publishing during the summer the first volume of American Poems, the earliest anthology of American poetry. Early in September, he settled as a physician in New York City, and despite his years soon won an enviable professional reputation, strengthened by the publication in 1795 of his Letters to William Buel on the Fever in New-York in 1795.
After 1794 he lived with a fellow bachelor and lover of letters, a young lawyer, William Johnson. Their house, at first on Cedar Street, later on Pine, became the headquarters of the Friendly Club, with William Dunlap, Dr. Samuel Latham Mitchill, Edward and Samuel Miller, James Kent, William Walton Woolson, George Morrison Woolson, and Anthony Bleecker as members.
Dunlap staged Smith's Edwin and Angelina, originally written as a drama but revised as a ballad opera, at the John Street theatre, December 19, 1796; it had a moderate success and was published by Swords in New York the following year and later republished in London, with a collection of other plays. Smith in turn assisted Dunlap in the publication of Andre (1798) and wrote the address for the opening of the Park Theatre, January 29, 1798. He was a trustee of the colored school in the city, and one of the organizers of the American Mineralogical Society in 1798.
With Dr. Mitchill and Dr. Edward Miller he projected the first American medical journal, the Medical Repository, and edited it with them from the summer of 1797 to his death, contributing extensively to it himself. His last literary ventures were his American edition of Erasmus Darwin's The Botanic Garden (1798), prefaced with a long verse epistle to Darwin, and a noteworthy series of critical and biographical sketches of contemporary American writers in the Monthly Magazine (London), July-October, 1798.
With Brown, who became an occupant of his home in the summer of 1798, he was planning a magazine and review to be undertaken in New York. The disastrous yellow fever epidemic of 1798, however, intervened. Smith, already exhausted with conscientious attendance upon many patients, took into his household Dr. Joseph B. Scandella, an Italian physician dying with the disease, contracted it himself (as did Brown also), and died on September 19, 1798, about a fortnight after his twenty-seventh birthday.
Membership
He was active as a member of the New York Society for Promoting the Manumission of Slaves.
Personality
He is described by his contemporaries as a man of lovable character and great talents, and his zeal and enthusiasm for literature, science, and the advancement of humanity knew virtually no limit.
Quotes from others about the person
As it mentioned in "Memoirs of Dr. Elihu Hubbard Smith", New York, "His writings, already published, incessantly awaken regret, that the number of them is not greater. They will long do honour to his memory. They display singular diligence and acuteness of research, the talents of accurate and extensive observation, great force and precision of reasoning, and the range of a vigorous and comprehensive mind. "