Background
Jacob Bigelow was born on February 27, 1787, in Watertown, Massachusetts, United States, the son of Jacob Bigelow, a Congregational minister, and of Elizabeth (Wells) Bigelow.
(Excerpt from An Introductory Lecture on the Treatment of ...)
Excerpt from An Introductory Lecture on the Treatment of Disease: Delivered Before the Medical Class at the Massachusetts Medical College, in Boston, November 3, 1852 It would at first seem that the exact sciences were those most worthy the cultivation of intelligent minds, inasmuch as they lead to satisfactory, and therefore to gratifying results; and because, in their more elevated departments, they involve and require some of the highest reaches of the human intellect. But in the opinions of mankind, as evinced by their practice, the opposite judgment prevails, and probably nine-tenths of the labor of educated and intellectual men, are employed on studies which are, in their nature, un certain and conjectural. The cause of this great ascendancy in the attention given to the inexact sciences, is to be found in the vast and paramount importance of their subjects, and also in the difficulty of consummating their great ends. It is much more important to mankind to know how to avoid anarchy and crime, war, famine, poverty and pestilence, than it is to know that the planet Saturn has a ring, or that a lily has six stamens, that light can be polarized, or that potass can be decomposed. Yet while the latter propositions are susceptible of absolute demonstration, the former processes, which bear directly on human happiness or misery, are fre quently removed beyond our foresight or control. The wisest men often fail to influence the destinies of states, families, and individuals, and the shrewdest calculators are baffled in regard to a coming crop, apecuniary crisis, a glut in the commercial market, or a change in the public morals. Nevertheless, the wise man conscious of superior talent, and the phi lanthropist desirous of the public weal, and even the interested man who looks to his personal advantage and progress, must give themselves and their energies to studies which involve the immediate wants of their fellow-men, even though their best directed efforts should fail of the desired results. And the simple reason is, that if the best qualified minds decline to undertake this task, it will most assuredly be assumed by the ignorant and presumptuous. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
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Jacob Bigelow was born on February 27, 1787, in Watertown, Massachusetts, United States, the son of Jacob Bigelow, a Congregational minister, and of Elizabeth (Wells) Bigelow.
Jacob entered Harvard at the age of sixteen and graduated in 1806. In 1809 he matriculated in the medical department of the University of Pennsylvania, studying under Dr. B. S. Barton, botanist and physician, whose work on the medicinal plants of the United States exerted a strong influence on Bigelow's subsequent career. He received his M. D. from Pennsylvania in 1810.
On returning to Boston in 1811 Bigelow formed an association with Dr. James Jackson whose successor he ultimately became. Whilst building up his medical practise, Bigelow had not forgotten his botanical interests, and in 1812 gave, in conjunction with a Dr. Peck, a series of botanical lectures at Harvard. He was the first native botanist to collect and to systematize the knowledge of the New England flora in a thoroughgoing way. In connection with his botanical lectures and in the preparation of drugs for his medical practise, he commenced the intensive study of the flora of the Boston region, and in 1814 published a modest book, Florula Bostoniensis. The first edition of this work dealt only with the flora within a ten-mile radius, but by 1824 Bigelow had, with Dr. Francis Booth, explored the mountains of New Hampshire and Vermont, so that he was able to reprint his book, retaining its unassuming title, but now enlarged, corrected, popularized, and in a general way made useful for all New England. The Florula Bostoniensis remained the standard manual of New England botany till the appearance of Gray's Manual (1848).
Bigelow's most important botanical contribution, the American Medical Botany, in three volumes, began to appear in 1817; the second volume was published in 1818, and the last in 1820. This work contained sixty plates colored by a special process of the author's own invention. Bigelow also took an important part in preparing the first American Pharmacopoeia, which appeared in 1820. He departed from Continental usage in insisting upon the utmost simplicity in nomenclature. In 1822 was issued his Treatise on the Materia Medica, which was intended as a sequel to the Pharmacopæia.
In 1815 Bigelow had been made professor of materia medica in the Harvard Medical School, a post which he continued to hold until 1855. During these years his medical fame was increasing, not only was his position at the Massachusetts General Hospital and the Harvard Medical School conspicuous. He embodied in his Discourse on Self-limited Diseases (1835) the idea that many disorders if left to the natural recuperative powers of the patient would disappear more rapidly than from excessive medical treatment. Of this lecture Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes said that it exerted more influence upon medical practise in America than any work that had ever been published in this country. In his Address on the Limits of Education (1865) Bigelow attacked classical education, denying that the dead languages were the indispensable preliminaries to all useful training. He was the more entitled to do this because he was himself a classical scholar of brilliant attainments.
In 1832 Bigelow was sent to New York with a committee to study the newly arrived Asiatic cholera. Upon his return his native state refused to readmit the committee, so great was the terror of Boston, but Bigelow eluded the quarantine and hastened back to his patients. For some years (1816 - 1827), besides all his other duties, he had been holding the chair of application of science to the useful arts, established by Count Rumford, and in connection with his teaching of mechanics, for which he had a passion, he invented the term "technology. " In 1829 he published his Rumford lectures under the title Elements of Technology, and they were again expanded in 1840 in a work The Useful Arts.
One of the many acts of his vigorous life was the foundation of Mt. Auburn Cemetery (1831), in Cambridge, Massachussets, in an effort to protect the health of the community which was then often imperiled by injudicious interment. He is often asserted to have been the first to conceive that cemeteries might receive the attention which is ordinarily devoted to private gardens. Before his death, which occurred in Boston, his intellectual faculties became somewhat impaired. But even in his mental uncertainties a sort of playful genius exhibited itself in the clever doggerel by which he translated Mother Goose into Latin under the title of Chenodia. His early metrical reflections in English and the classic tongues had been privately and anonymously printed. In addition to the works already mentioned, he wrote: Nature in Disease (1854); Eolopoesis, American Rejected Addresses (1855); Brief Expositions of Rational Medicine (1858); and Modern Inquiries (1867).
(Excerpt from An Introductory Lecture on the Treatment of ...)
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From 1847 to 1863 Bigelow was president of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, of which he was a member for sixty-seven years.
Bigelow was married in 1817 to Mary Scollay, daughter of Col. William Scollay.