An Address on the Life, Character and Writings of Elisha Bartlett: Late Professor of Materia Medica and Medical Jurisprudence in the College of ... District Medical Society, December 26, 1855
(Excerpt from An Address on the Life, Character and Writin...)
Excerpt from An Address on the Life, Character and Writings of Elisha Bartlett: Late Professor of Materia Medica and Medical Jurisprudence in the College of Physician and Surgeons, New York, Before the Middlesex North District Medical Society, December 26, 1855
Bartlett was a contributor, also, to the American Med ical Journal, and many valuable papers, that adorn the columns of that standard periodical, were from his pen.
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Elisha Huntington was an American physician and public official.
Background
Elisha was born on 9 April, 1796, at Topsfield, Massachussets, where his father, Rev. Asahel Huntington, was pastor of the Congregational Church. He was a descendant of Simon Huntington who died on his way from England to Roxbury, Massachussets, in 1633. His mother was Alethea Lord, and his maternal grandfather, Elisha Lord, M. D. , of Pomfret, Connecticut, whose Christian name he received. In their hope that Elisha would become a physician his parents were not disappointed.
Education
After graduation from Dartmouth College in 1815, he taught in Marietta, Ohio, from 1815 to 1819, and at an academy in Marblehead, Massachussets, from 1819 to 1820. He then entered the medical school connected with Yale College, from which he received the degree of M. D. in 1823.
Career
In 1824 (according to several Lowell historians, though his daughter, Mrs. J. P. Cooke, in A Few Memories of William Reed Huntington, 1910, says in 1826) he settled at East Chelmsford, Massachussets, incorporated soon after his arrival as the town of Lowell. He became its foremost citizen – an able and popular general practitioner whose ministrations covered a wide territory in Middlesex County – and a public man who helped to shape many of the institutions of a fast-growing community.
His public career began in 1826 when he was elected to the first Lowell school board. In 1833 and 1834 he was a selectman, and when Lowell became a city in 1836, he was on its first council, of which he was chosen president in 1838. The following year he was elected mayor to succeed Luther Lawrence, who had died in office. He was reëlected seven times, though not in successive years. In 1852, running on the Whig ticket, he was elected lieutenant-governor of Massachusetts, his term beginning in 1853.
Amidst these political activities Huntington, always a family physician of the best type, kept up an extensive medical practice. His Address on the Life, Character, and Writings of Elisha Bartlett (1856), like his mayoral addresses, is a model of simple, dignified writing. When a state almshouse was established at Tewksbury, Dr. Huntington was appointed inspector for three years; later, as consulting physician, he had large influence in developing a technique for the treatment of the indigent and unfortunate. In honor of this citizen of many attainments, Lowell in 1853 dedicated a public auditorium, Huntington Hall, from the platform of which many notable men and women spoke in the heyday of the lyceum lecture.
In 1860 he was chosen an overseer of Harvard College. Through attendance at the overseers' meetings and through possession of similar scientific and literary tastes, he became a close friend of Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes. Huntington's death followed a severe cold contracted while he attended the funeral of a fellow physician, Dr. P. P. Campbell. The subsequent funeral services at St. John's Episcopal Church, of which he was senior warden, were of unusual impressiveness.
(Excerpt from An Address on the Life, Character and Writin...)
Membership
He attended regularly the meetings of the Middlesex North District Medical Society, of which, in 1848-49, he was president. He served as president of the Massachusetts Medical Society from 1855 to 1857.
Connections
He married, May 31, 1825, Hannah, daughter of Joseph and Deborah Hinckley, of Marblehead. They had five children.