Giles Firman [Firmin] now in England, did make and
read upon very well, but no more of that now."
Since the time of the Apostle Eliot the Lord has stirred up the hearts of
our people to the building of many Schools and Colleges where medicine is
taught in all its branches. Mr. Giles Firmin's "Anatomy" may be
considered the first ancestor of a long line of skeletons which have been
dangling and rattling in our lecture-rooms for more than a century.
Teaching in New England in 1647 was a grave but simple matter. A single
person, combining in many cases, as in that of Mr. Giles Firmin, the
offices of physician and preacher, taught what he knew to a few disciples
whom he gathered about him. Of the making of that "Anatomy" on which my
first predecessor in the branch I teach "did read very well" we can know
nothing. The body of some poor wretch who had swung upon the gallows,
was probably conveyed by night to some lonely dwelling at the outskirts
of the village, and there by the light of flaring torches hastily
dissected by hands that trembled over the unwonted task. And ever and
anon the master turned to his book, as he laid bare the mysteries of the
hidden organs; to his precious Vesalius, it might be, or his figures
repeated in the multifarious volume of Ambroise Pare; to the Aldine
octavo in which Fallopius recorded his fresh observations; or that giant
folio of Spigelius just issued from the press of Amsterdam, in which
lovely ladies display their viscera with a coquettish grace implying that
it is rather a pleasure than otherwise to show the lace-like omentum, and
hold up their appendices epiploicae as if they were saying "these are our
jewels.
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