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The 18th century was a wealth of knowledge, exploration...)
The 18th century was a wealth of knowledge, exploration and rapidly growing technology and expanding record-keeping made possible by advances in the printing press. In its determination to preserve the century of revolution, Gale initiated a revolution of its own: digitization of epic proportions to preserve these invaluable works in the largest archive of its kind. Now for the first time these high-quality digital copies of original 18th century manuscripts are available in print, making them highly accessible to libraries, undergraduate students, and independent scholars.
Delve into what it was like to live during the eighteenth century by reading the first-hand accounts of everyday people, including city dwellers and farmers, businessmen and bankers, artisans and merchants, artists and their patrons, politicians and their constituents. Original texts make the American, French, and Industrial revolutions vividly contemporary.
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The below data was compiled from various identification fields in the bibliographic record of this title. This data is provided as an additional tool in helping to insure edition identification:
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Bodleian Library (Oxford)
W002522
Caption title. Opening lines: You being the only surviving referees in the late cause between Dr. Gardiner and Mr. James Flagg, it has been long expected that you should either have cleared up your proceedings in that affair, or have made the Dr. some suitable recompence for the scandalous injustice of your award .. Attributed to Gardiner by Evans. Mistakenly dated 1767 by Evans; an affidavit on p. 6 is dated March 20, 1769.
Boston : s.n, 1769. 14,2p. ; 8°
Silvester Gardiner was a Loyalist physician and landowner and drug merchant. He established his own apothecary shop at the “Sign of the Unicorn and Mortar”.
Background
Silvester Gardiner was a descendant of George Gardiner (1600-1645) who sailed from Bristol to Boston on the Fellowship (June 1637), and seventh child of William Gardiner, cordwainer, by his wife Abigail Remington, was born in South Kingston, Rhode Island.
Education
Silvester Gardiner was a sickly child and was educated privately at Boston by his brother-in-law, the Rev. James MacSparran, a classical scholar who tutored a few of the sons of the more wealthy colonists.
As Silvester showed early an aptitude for medicine, MacSparran encouraged this bent, and made it possible for him to study for eight years abroad, beginning about 1727. In London, Gardiner came under William Cheselden, surgeon to St. Thomas’s Hospital, from whom he learned to do the lateral operation for kidney stone.
He studied also in Paris, but disliked that city.
Career
On returning to Boston, Gardiner soon found himself engaged in an extensive and lucrative practise, and his marriage to the daughter of a wealthy Boston physician proved no obstacle to his advancement.
Feeling that drugs were then improperly dispensed in Boston, he established his own apothecary shop at the “Sign of the Unicorn and Mortar” on Winter and Tremont Streets, the venture proving so profitable that he opened similar shops in Meriden and Hartford, Connecticut.
Meanwhile his fame as a surgeon had spread, and on October 8, 1741, he successfully removed in the presence of the “Medical Society of Boston” a large stone from the kidney of a boy of six.
In his only medical publication, which was issued as a broadside in March 1761, he proposed the foundation of a hospital for smallpox.
In 1753, Gardiner began his activities in developing land in Maine. Under the charter of the Kennebec Company, of which he was the chief promoter, title was gained to land extending for seven miles on each side of the Kennebec River and inland for fifty miles from the mouth.
He invested large sums in settling this area, and the towns of Pittston and Gardiner were built by him. These activities soon involved him in legal dispute, and in 1767, six controversial pamphlets appeared at Boston in which the facts of one of his suits, that against James Flagg, were variously set forth. Others appeared in 1770.
From there he went to New York, where he remained till October 1778, when he embarked for England. On arrival in London he applied for subsistence to Lord George Germain, at whose recommendation he was given a yearly allowance of £150 from the Treasury.
Early in 1785, he returned to America and settled in Newport, Rhode Island. After some trouble he eventually recovered a small part of his land in Maine, but his house and apothecary shop had been destroyed, and his library of 500 volumes sold at auction by William Cooper in 1778-79.
He died suddenly of fever, in 1786, and was buried at Trinity Church, Newport. A portrait by Copley is still in the family.
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The 18th century was a wealth of knowledge, exploration...)
Politics
During the events preceding the Revolution, Gardiner established himself as an ardent Loyalist, and when Washington took command of the Continental Army at Dorchester, Gardiner’s property had already been confiscated. He was forced to flee to Halifax in ignominious circumstances.
Personality
Gardiner was energetic and public-spirited, with broad and liberal views. He built a large house and lavishly entertained many of the important persons of his time.
Connections
Gardiner was married three times: first, in December, 1732, at King’s Chapel, to Anne, daughter of Dr. John Gibbins (or Gibbons), who bore him six children, their eldest son being John Gardiner; second, about 1772, to Mrs. Love Eppes, widow of William Eppes and daughter of Benjamin Pickman of Salem; and third, on February 18, 1785, to Catherine Goldthwait, forty-five years his junior. There were no children by his last two marriages.