William Aspinwall was born on May 23, 1743 in Brookline, Massachusetts, United States. He was the son of Thomas and Joanna (Gardner) Aspinwall, and descended from Peter Aspinwall, one of the 4, 000 Puritans of 1630 who followed the Mayflower. He was born on the ancestral farm in Brookline, in the house which had been built by Peter in 1660.
He was educated by a clergyman, the Rev. Amos Adams, obtained his degree at Harvard in 1764, and then studied medicine, first with Dr. Benjamin Gale of Killingworth, Connecticut, author of A Treatise on Small Pox Inoculation, and later with Dr. William Shippen of Philadelphia, who gave him a certificate for skill in 1769.
He was in the ranks at the battle of Lexington and carried from the field the body of Isaac Gardner, whose daughter, Susanna, he later married. Immediately after Lexington he applied for a commission in the Continental army but was persuaded by Dr. Joseph Warren to enter the military medical department, in which he was appointed brigade surgeon and deputy director to an army hospital at Jamaica Plain, Massachussets After peace was declared, Dr. Aspinwall opened at Brookline, Massachussets, an inoculation hospital for small-pox, the second of its kind in America.
The "business, " as it was called, prospered until the coming of vaccination in which Aspinwall recognized a method superior to that which he had been using: he thereupon closed the doors of his hospital.
His private practise, however, remained large, and in going his rounds on horseback he often covered as much as forty miles in one day. Although slated for appointment in a new "Massachusetts College of Physicians, " he withdrew his name from the petition for a charter on becoming convinced that the proposed institution would injure the already well-established medical department at Harvard.
He was a leader in the town affairs of Brookline as treasurer, warden, representative to the General Court, state senator, and member of the governor's council.
Fellow member of the Massachusetts Medical Society (1812).
Physical characteristics: an accident in youth lost him the use of one eye, and late in life he was afflicted with a cataract in the other, so that, despite an operation, total blindness resulted.
He married in 1776 to Susanna Gardner, by whom he had seven children.
