First Medical College in Vermont: Castleton, 1818-1862

V hbl, stx R 747.C2932W3 First medical college in Vermont: 3 T153 DD515D13 3 £tf S THE HISTORY OF THE FIRST MEDICAL COLLEGE IN VERMONT OC Oss «M5 1$ 1> <3 THE-5IRST MEDICAL COLLEGE IN VERMONT Castleton 1818-1862 FREDERICK CLAYTON WAITE VERMONT HISTORICAL SOCIETY MONTPELIER 1949 COPYRIGHT 1949 BY VERMONT HISTORICAL SOCIETY VERMONT PRINTING COMPANY, BRATTLEBORO, VERMONT FOREWORD This volume realizes the long-time hope that a history of Castleton Medical College could be written by Dr. Waite, foremost authority on the early medical colleges and on many other subjects of medical history. With his history of the medical college at Woodstock, Vermont, which the Society had the honor to publish in 1945, this completes the story of the medical colleges in Vermont which had a great influence on a national scale until the Civil War interrupted. The projected history of the Medical Department of the University of Vermont, by another author, when completed and published, should bring up to date the history of all medical educational institutions in Vermont. It is impossible to praise too highly the great devotion and research and effort freely contributed by Dr. Waite. Many years have passed since he first considered it, and was urged to complete it, at his own expense. The Rutland County Medical Society has given $100 and Mr. George Adam Ellis has given $1,000 to pay for some of the expenses of preparation and publication which could not be met by the Society or by Dr. Waite. There have been other contributions of money and time. Without these gifts Dr. Waite could not have written the book and made permanent the result of his long research. Without them the Vermont Historical Society could not have published this record. The Society, like Dr. Waite, will be proud of this permanent contri- bution, richer in accomplishment, and poorer in funds. John Clement Chairman, Committee on Publications Vermont Historical Society. TABLE OF CONTENTS PAGE Preface 9 I. The Location 15 II. Rutland County Grammar School and Castleton Seminary 24 III. The Proprietors 37 IV. The Founding 49 V. The First Five Years: 1818-22 59 VI. Growth and Expansion: 1823-27 72 VII. A Decade of Retrogression: 1828-38 79 VIII. Trustees and Faculty 89 IX. Students and Graduates 100 X. The Curriculum 116 XI. Credentials, Student Expense, Income, Discipline 128 XII. Publications and Relation to Medical Societies . 137 XIII. Revtval and Prosperity: 1840-1846 148 XIV. Beginning of the Decline: 1847-1856 158 XV. Deterioration and Closing: 1857-1862 167 Appendices 175 A. The Charter and Amendments 175 B. Members of the Corporation 177 C. Delegates from the Vermont Medical Society 180 D. Faculty 183 E. Dates of Opening and Closing 189 F. Attendance by Sessions and Graduates 191 G. Annual Number of Graduates in All New England Medical Colleges from 1820 to 1861 193 Catalogue of All Graduates 195 Catalogue of All Non-graduates 238 Index 271 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS PAGE The Medical Building, about 1855 Frontispiece Castleton Meeting House, built in 1790 Facing page 22 Second Meeting House, built in 1833, as of 1947. .Facing page 22 Building of Castleton Seminary from 1829-1924 On page 32 Dr. Selah Gridley, the Founder Facing page 38 Mrs. Beulah Langdon Gridley Facing page 39 Dr. Theodore Woodward Facing page 42 The Medical Building, in 1947 Facing page 66 Graph of Attendance and Graduates by Sessions On page 103 Five Tickets of Professors On page 129 The First Announcement of 1818 On page 137 The Second Catalogue of 1819-20 On page 139 Dr. Joseph Perkins Facing page 166 PREFACE Medical Colleges in small towns were a prominent feature of Ameri- can medical education in the nineteenth century. They were familiarly called country medical colleges, sometimes in deference and again in disdain, because members of the medical profession were divided in their opinions of the relative merits of country and urban medical colleges. A considerable number of arguments were published in support of one or the other opinion. Approximately one hundred medical colleges began operation in the American colonies and the United States before the Civil War, of which about one-fourth were sectarian institutions. Several medical colleges had a life of less than ten years. Others, although chartered, did not actually begin operation. A few private teaching institutions were organized for supplementary medical teaching without authority to confer medical degrees. One of the better known of these was the Tremont Street Medical School, organized in Boston in 1838; it continued its activity during twenty years. Such institutions were called medical schools, while the majority of those that granted medical degrees were called medical colleges. An arbitrary figure of population must be chosen to differentiate country and urban institutions. A population of 10,000 may be used to separate cities from towns in the first half of the nineteenth century and on this basis approximately one-third of the one hundred medical colleges were country institutions when they began operation. A majority of these continued in that group throughout their existence. Adoption of 20,000 population as a criterion would increase the pro- portion of country medical colleges to nearly one-half the total number. A phase of medical education that included at least one-third of the incorporated medical colleges deserves more attention than it has received from medical historians. Appendix G shows the comparative influence of country medical colleges in New England in the graduation of physicians. I have been interested in country medical colleges for thirty years and have accumulated information about individual institutions which shows many features not found in urban institutions as well as lack of some procedures that characterized medical colleges in the cities. Separate histories have been published of several urban medical col- 10 PREFACE leges. Brief accounts of some country medical colleges are included in histories of the few colleges of arts with which country medical colleges were affiliated or were definite departments. A few articles concerning country medical colleges have been published in journals. However, no detailed history of any one of the thirty-three country medical colleges was available until 1945, when the Vermont His- torical Society published The Story of a Country Medical College, a History of the Clinical School of Medicine and the Vermont Medical College at Woodstock, Vermont, 1827-1856, which I wrote. This was written with knowledge that the institution at Woodstock was not one of the three leading members of this group. These three were: The College of Physicians and Surgeons of the Western District of York, at Fairfield, New York (1812-1841) New ; The Castleton Medical College, to use its last name, at Castleton, Vermont (1818-1862) ; and The Berkshire Medical College, at Pitts- field, Massachusetts (1823-1867). The last two had exactly the same number of years intervening between their openings and closings. How- ever, the Castleton institution was suspended during two years. There- fore the institution at Pittsfield operated during more years than any country medical college that was not permanently affiliated with a college of arts. The institution at Castleton gave more sessions of instruc- tion than the institution at Pittsfield under a policy in operation during twenty years when it gave two sessions and graduated two classes in each calendar year. These three leading country medical colleges in three adjacent states were each within a little more than a hundred miles of the two others. The manuscript records of the trustees of the medical college at Castleton from 1818 to 1856 and the faculty minutes from 1840 to 1859 were rescued a few years ago from a rubbish pile cleaned out of the attic of an old house in a town near Castleton. Search for the first volume of the faculty minutes from 1818 to 1838 and for the second volume of the records of the trustees from 1856 to approximately 1864 has proved fruitless. These rescued records, together with a nearly complete file of catalogues collected through fifteen years, permit writing the history of one of the important country medical colleges, and the one with the largest number of graduates, over fourteen hundred in course. The institution at Fairfield graduated fewer than six hundred men and the one at Pittsfield a few more than eleven hundred. The Castleton institution graduated more men in the years from 1820 PREFACE II to 1861 inclusive than any other medical college in New England, approximately one-fifth of the total number graduated in eleven medical colleges in that area in those years. I expect that the narrative of this volume will be criticized for not having more documentation. A critic should know that comparatively little has been printed about this institution. A history of Rutland County, in which Castleton is located, published in 1877, gave two octavo pages to the medical college and contains several errors that were repeated in a county history published in 1880. A purported history published in 1882 in its nine pages contains only a copy of the charter and its amendments and a list of officers, trustees, and teachers with many erroneous dates. The histories of the state of Vermont have only brief generalized references to this medical college. The histories of medical education in the United States also contain only brief men- tion until a book published in 1944 gave four pages to the medical college at Castleton. The condition of published misinformation may be illustrated by the statement that has long appeared in the American Medical Directory, published by the American Medical Association, which accredits the institution with a total of three hundred and fifty graduates, less than one-fourth the actual number of men who received the degree of Doctor of Medicine in course.

Load more