Science and Medicine 205century the Dutch- English doctor Bernard Mandeville dismissed some so-
called Newtonian physicians as mere “Braggadocio’s, who... only make
use of the Name of Mathematicks to impose upon the World for Lucre.”^18
Throughout the eighteenth century the British colonies of North Amer-
ica shared little in the growing excitement over medical science, although
Cotton Mather’s stunning success in inoculating his Boston neighbors
against smallpox gave some grounds for optimism. No more than about
one in ten colonial “doctors” had attended medical school, and apprentice-
trained practitioners typically averaged little more than a year learning
their art. In 1786 the prominent Philadelphia physician Benjamin Rush ex-
plained to a London colleague why American practitioners seemed so little
attracted to science. “Philosophy does not here, as in England, walk abroad
in silver slippers,” he wrote; “the physicians (who are the most general
repositories of science) are chained down by the drudgery of their profes-
sions; so as to be precluded from exploring our woods and mountains.”^19
Still, the medical community often played a leading role in the cultiva-
tion of natural history and natural philosophy. Medical men composed
nearly one- fi fth of the early membership of Philadelphia’s American Phil-
osophical Society, which devoted one of its six sections to “medicine and
anatomy.”^20 In 1765 the trustees of the College of Philadelphia created the
fi rst medical professorship in British North America and appointed the
Edinburgh- trained John Morgan to fi ll it. The whole purpose of the ven-
ture was to provide training in the medical sciences, not to offer clinical
training, which was still acquired by apprenticeship. In sharing his vision
of medical education, Morgan emphasized the importance of “medical
science,” comprising such disciplines as anatomy, materia medica, botany,
and chemistry. He urged that “medical researches and careful experi-
ments” be undertaken in the fi eld of natural history, “as natural history
is one of the most essential studies to prepare a person for prosecuting
medicine with success, and one of the most distinguished ornaments of a
physician and man of letters.”^21
By the turn of the nineteenth century it was becoming commonplace
to associate medicine with science, a term rapidly supplanting natural
philosophy to designate the systematic study of nature. In surveying the
progress of medicine in his Brief Retrospect of the Eighteenth Century (1803),
the American clergyman Samuel Miller praised physicians for revolution-
izing their “immense fi eld of science,” while candidly admitting that his
fellow Americans had contributed little to the “science of medicine” dur-
ing the fi rst half of the century. By applying Lord Bacon’s “plan of pur-
suing knowledge by observation, experiment, analysis and induction,”
medical men had introduced “a more precise, rigid and logical mode of