Blood-letting in some inflammations, fasting
in the early stage of fevers, and some of those peremptory drugs with
which most of us have been well acquainted in our time, the infragrant
memories of which I will not pursue beyond this slight allusion, are
among his remedies.
The Winthrops, to one of whom Dr. Stafford's directions were addressed,
were the medical as well as the political advisers of their
fellow-citizens for three or four successive generations. One of them,
Governor John of Connecticut, practised so extensively, that, but for his
more distinguished title in the State, he would have been remembered as
the Doctor. The fact that he practised in another colony, for the most
part, makes little difference in the value of the records we have of his
medical experience, which have fortunately been preserved, and give a
very fair idea, in all probability, of the way in which patients were
treated in Massachusetts, when they fell into intelligent and somewhat
educated hands, a little after the middle of the seventeenth century:
I have before me, while writing, a manuscript collection of the medical
cases treated by him, and recorded at the time in his own hand, which has
been intrusted to me by our President, his descendant.
They are generally marked Hartford, and extend from the year 1657 to
1669. From these, manuscripts, and from the letters printed in the
Winthrop Papers published by our Society, I have endeavored to obtain
some idea of the practice of Governor John Winthrop, Junior.
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