The Pilgrims of the Mayflower had with them a good physician, a man of standing, a deacon of their church, one whom they loved and trusted, Dr. Samuel Fuller.  But no medical skill could keep cold and hunger and bad food, and, probably enough, desperate homesickness in some of the feebler sort, from doing their work.  No detailed record remains of what they suffered or what was attempted for their relief during the first sad winter.  The graves of those who died were levelled and sowed with grain that the losses of the little band might not be suspected by the savage tenants of the wilderness, and their story remains untold.

Of Dr. Fuller’s practice, at a later period, we have an account in a letter of his to Governor Bradford, dated June, 1630.  “I have been to Matapan” (now Dorchester), he says, “and let some twenty of those people blood.”  Such wholesale depletion as this, except with avowed homicidal intent, is quite unknown in these days; though I once saw the noted French surgeon, Lisfranc, in a fine phlebotomizing frenzy, order some ten or fifteen patients, taken almost indiscriminately, to be bled in a single morning.

Dr. Fuller’s two visits to Salem, at the request of Governor Endicott, seem to have been very satisfactory to that gentleman.  Morton, the wild fellow of Merry Mount, gives a rather questionable reason for the Governor’s being so well pleased with the physician’s doings.  The names under which he mentions the two personages, it will be seen, are not intended to be complimentary.  “Dr. Noddy did a great cure for Captain Littleworth.  He cured him of a disease called a wife.”  William Gager, who came out with Winthrop, is spoken of as “a right godly man and skilful chyrurgeon, but died of a malignant fever not very long after his arrival.”

Two practitioners of the ancient town of Newbury are entitled to special notice, for different reasons.  The first is Dr. John Clark, who is said by tradition to have been the first regularly educated physician who resided in New England.  His portrait, in close-fitting skull-cap, with long locks and venerable flowing beard, is familiar to our eyes on the wall of our Society’s antechamber.  His left hand rests upon a skull, his right hand holds an instrument which deserves a passing comment.  It is a trephine, a surgical implement for cutting round pieces out of broken skulls, so as to get at the fragments which have been driven in, and lift them up.  It has a handle like that of a gimlet, with a claw like a hammer, to lift with, I suppose, which last contrivance I do not see figured in my books.  But the point I refer to is this:  the old instrument, the trepan, had a handle like a wimble, what we call a brace or bit-stock.  The trephine is not mentioned at all in Peter Lowe’s book, London, 1634; nor in Wiseman’s great work on Surgery, London, 1676; nor in the translation of Dionis, published by Jacob Tonson, in 1710.  In fact it was only brought into more general use