Giles Firmin, known to medical history as the first colonial physician to prepare a skeleton and to lecture on anatomy, was a Puritan minister whose writings, while upholding the New England Way as a model of church government, criticized some of its more rigid doctrines in ways that foreshadowed the liberal attitudes of the eighteenth century. Born in England at Ipswich, son of Giles Firmin, an apothecary, Firmin matriculated at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, in 1629 and studied medicine. Before taking a degree he left with his father for New England in 1632. Firmin was admitted a member of the First Church in Boston, where his father was ordained deacon, and then he sailed for London in 1633 to finish his medical training. He returned to Boston in 1637 at the height of the Antinomian controversy, in which certain members of the colony challenged the authority of the Puritan ministry, and was present...