Skilful men, of the
medical and chirurgical profession, were of rare occurrence in
the colony. They seldom, it would appear, partook of the
religious zeal that brought other emigrants across the Atlantic.
In their researches into the human frame, it may be that the
higher and more subtle faculties of such men were materialised,
and that they lost the spiritual view of existence amid the
intricacies of that wondrous mechanism, which seemed to involve
art enough to comprise all of life within itself. At all events,
the health of the good town of Boston, so far as medicine had
aught to do with it, had hitherto lain in the guardianship of an
aged deacon and apothecary, whose piety and godly deportment
were stronger testimonials in his favour than any that he could
have produced in the shape of a diploma. The only surgeon was
one who combined the occasional exercise of that noble art with
the daily and habitual flourish of a razor. To such a
professional body Roger Chillingworth was a brilliant
acquisition. He soon manifested his familiarity with the
ponderous and imposing machinery of antique physic; in which
every remedy contained a multitude of far-fetched and
heterogeneous ingredients, as elaborately compounded as if the
proposed result had been the Elixir of Life.
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