John Warren / [Walter L. Burrage].

  • Walter Lincoln Burrage
Date:
[1925]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: John Warren / [Walter L. Burrage]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    BURRAGE: JOHN WARREN of any president, and at a time when the recently reorganized society needed a strong hand to guide it on its new path. In the winter of 1780, Warren undertook to give a course of lectures on anat¬ omy at the military hospital in Boston. His audience was composed of persons attached to the army in a medical capacity, a few medical students and some physicians of Boston, not a large gathering but one intensely interested in the practical dissections on the cadaver that had to be carried on with great secrecy on account of popular prejudice. The lectures were so much of a success that he was asked to repeat them. This he did, the course being attended by many literary and scientific men, including President Willard and members of the Harvard corporation, as well as by students from the college. A third course was given in Boston. It was in the winter of 1781, just after the first meeting of the state medical society, that Warren performed with success at the military hos¬ pital the operation of amputation at the shoulder joint. Dr. Warren married in 1777 Miss Abigail Collins, daughter of John Collins, afterward Governor of Rhode Island. He had met her while she was visiting Colonel Mifflin’s family in Cambridge. They had a happy married life of 37 years that was blessed by the birth of seventeen children. The eldest, the emi¬ nent John Collins, born in 1778, did the first operation under ether anaesthesia; and the youngest, Edward, born in 1804 was his father’s biographer. Dr. War¬ ren kept in close touch with his children; the letters he wrote to John Collins when John was a student of medicine at Edinburgh show strong affection, a broad outlook, and are delightful reading today. As recording some of the many activities of this pioneer surgeon and organizer it is to be noted that in 1778 he formed a partnership with Isaac Rand and Lemuel Hayward to make a hospital at Sewall’s Point, Brookline, for the inoculation for smallpox and the treatment of patients attacked by that dread disease. He volunteered as a private in the Rhode Island Campaign, returning to his hospital duties and to his family at its conclusion. The Corporation of Harvard College, impressed by Warren’s efforts at teaching, voted in November, 1782, to establish a medical school with three professorships, on lines laid down by him. Warren was appointed to fill the chair of anatomy and surgery. His first lectures were given in Cambridge during the winter of 1783. He had a well modulated voice, an impressive manner, seldom used notes and held the attention of his students for periods as long as 2 hours. To reach Cambridge from his home in Boston was a long and tiring journey. It was not until 1810 that the school was moved to Boston and then the professor of anatomy and surgery had the assistance of his eldest son, who, at his request, had been made adjunct professor in 1809, thus lightening the teaching labors of a busy practitioner, for Warren was much in demand and surgery occupied a good deal of his attention. He was cool and deliberate in operating and did not omit details; although impulsive by nature
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