Cotton Mather's medicine, with particular reference to measles

While the vocation of Cotton Mather (1663-1728) was his ministry in Boston, he made important contributions to medicine, most famously in helping to introduce variolation to New England in 1721-22 and in writing The Angel of Bethesda (1724), the first medical treatise produced in Colonial North America. This article, however, focuses on an earlier initiative, Mather's efforts to quell the epidemic of measles that struck Boston in 1713, killing among many others his wife and three children. Historians have devoted little attention to this episode or to measles in general, even though the disease was highly mortal during the colonial period. To help victims, Mather published a 'letter' on treating measles. Such a specific discussion of treatment would have been rare in Europe and it was unprecedented in America. The therapy that Mather proposed not only reflected popular medicine but also incorporated newer practices, notably those associated with Thomas Sydenham. In contrast to heroic therapies for measles, which were often dangerous but became more popular across the eighteenth century, Mather's recommendations were moderate.

"Enquire into All the Circumstances of the Patient Narrowly": John Rutherford's Clinical Lectures in Edinburgh, 1749-53

Early eighteenth-century Edinburgh provided a unique learning environment for aspiring practitioners: one in which the unity of medicine and surgery was appreciated and clinical observations and a reasoning practitioner became the well spring of proper patient care. John Rutherford, a surgical apprentice in this environment, student on the wards of London hospitals and under Boerhaave at Leiden, became one of the original medical professors at the University of Edinburgh medical school in 1726. Rutherford taught the popular, theory-based Practice of Medicine for twenty-two years. Then at the end of 1748 he convinced Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh managers to allow him to begin a new lecture series, entitled Clinical Lectures, conducted at the patient's bedside. Pedagogically, the new lecture series integrated medical theory and its application on the ward. Pragmatically, Rutherford used the Clinical Lectures to transition students into practitioners. He oriented the student to the medical profession at large and placed him simultaneously at the patient-disease-physician interface. He taught that systematic patient observation and examination, when combined with experience and reasoning, were essential to accurate diagnoses and proper therapeutic interventions. Importantly too, Rutherford prepared his students for failure through humility, introspection, and the speculative nature of medical practice.