The evolution of medicine in Connecticut with the foundation of the Yale Medical School as its notable achievement / [Walter R. Steiner].

  • Walter Ralph Steiner
Date:
1915
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Licence: In copyright

Credit: The evolution of medicine in Connecticut with the foundation of the Yale Medical School as its notable achievement / [Walter R. Steiner]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    question 44 Whether it be safe to grant the proposed charter for the medical societies in Connecticut,” and on the sixth day of January, in the year fol¬ lowing, they took up the subject again, in the form 44 Whether the institution of medical societies be useful.”1 The keen public interest in this appears to have been developed from the fear lest chartering a medical society might create a private monopoly. After the charter was granted, as the years passed on, public opposition ceased, for the effect of the medical society upon the medical profession was mag¬ ical. Thomas Miner, of Middletown, in a Presidential address before the society, in 1837, has shown to what a low ebb the majority of the profession had reached in 1792.2 Though capable physicians were rare, yet trustworthy surgeons were scarcer, and a competent obstetrician was almost unknown. He says, 44 there was not probably a good practitioner to a county.” By this professional union, however, quackery and mystery were largely banished from the profession, and the need of better facilities, in Connecticut, for medical education soon became painfully apparent. In 1800, the legislature dis¬ owned all pretenders as physicians by withhold¬ ing from them the legal power of collecting their professional debts, unless they had been legally examined and approved.3 1 The Literary Diary of Ezra Stiles, edited by Franklin Bowditch Dexter, New York, 1901, III, pp. 324 and 338. 2 Trans. Conn. Med. Soc., 1837, pp. 3-12. 3 Unfortunately this law was repealed by the legislature in June, 1842.