Physician

Beginnings.

Benjamin Waterhouse was born in Newport, Rhode Island, in 1754, the son of a judge. He studied medicine in his hometown for several years, but with the outbreak of the Revolutionary War in 1775 he left for England, where he was placed under the care of relatives. He continued his studies in Edinburgh, Scotland, and at Leyden in the Netherlands, where he graduated in 1780. After traveling through Europe, he returned to America.

Harvard.

When the Harvard Medical School was established in 1783, Benjamin Waterhouse was appointed professor of Physic (as medicine was then called) and served in that capacity until 1812. Waterhouse was known for his emphasis on investigation, as expounded in his The Rise, Progress, and Present State of Medicine (1791), which distinguished him from theoreticians such as Benjamin Rush who were often too eager to make their observations fit a unified theory. Although Waterhouse's most popular...