Frederick C. Waite

“ And so Marcus Whitman on his twenty-first birthday saw the possibility of satisfying his suppressed but not dead ambition for further study and entrance into a profession of service, a profession no less worthy than that of the ministry, toward which his mind had been directed by the associations of his school days in western Massachusetts. ”

“ Whitman for seven years had daily faced Death and loosened his grasp on his intended victims, for he had been schooled in the emergencies of seven years of independent country practice.
Fontenelle, the leader of the caravan, sent for Dr. Whitman and told him there were three cases in camp that looked like cholera. What shall be done? Must the caravan turn back? Must its members all die? No, said Whitman. I know the early symptoms. I have the medicines with me. The men are young and robust. We will fight the disease and overcome it. But to succeed we must attack at the earliest symptoms. ”

“ In 1843 he founded what is now the School of Medicine of Western Reserve University where he ended his teaching and where he died in 1867.
It was repeatedly said by his colleagues that he was the best medical teacher in the United States. He was personally of equally high standing. Of the highest degree of morality and integrity, benevolent, deeply religious, and with high ideals, he was the pride of every community in which he lived.
On January 29, 1832, Marcus Whitman received the degree of doctor of medicine from the College of Physicians and Surgeons of the Western District of New York. ”

“ Some laymen might wish to end the discussion of a person's medical education at the moment he receives his medical diploma, but those who are in the practice of medicine know that this is the end of only the initial phase of professional education and that there are many things not taught in the school that must be learned in practice. ”

“ We must now leave Marcus Whitman as an individual to sketch briefly the system of medical education in vogue in the northeastern United States in 1823 when he entered upon medical study.
During the first hundred and fifty years of the American colonies medical education was entirely by the apprentice system, for there were no medical schools in those colonies until 1765. Under this system a student attached himself to a practitioner, who was called a preceptor. ”

“ But these particular three years of 1832 to 1835 brought to him a type of education that no physician in America experienced prior to that year. Asiatic cholera had raged in northern Europe in the summer of 1831 and in June, 1832, it was brought to Montreal. In a few weeks it spread through all the region east of the Mississippi River, progressing along routes of water travel.
No period in American history so tried the souls of American physicians as the months from June to October, 1832. No one of them had received any instruction on this disease. None had ever seen a case. ”

“ Thus there were two methods by which one might become a legal practitioner, either by the receiving of the diploma of a medical society, after examination, or the diploma of a medical college after attendance and examination, but each required the essential three years of study under a preceptor. ”

“ As stated, it was unusual to admit a man to examination immediately after his first course of lectures. The diploma is dated at Fairfield, the town in which the school was located, and the only members of that society who knew him were the professors in the school and they would not have recommended him for examination unless he had shown himself a good student. Thus we have indirect, but none the less convincing, evidence that Marcus Whitman was of good intellectual capability and had been a diligent and proficient student. ”

“ If he passed the examination he was given a certificate of proficiency, called a diploma, which was accepted as evidence of qualification to practice, and upon registration with a civil authority he became a legal practitioner. The method of qualification through medical societies brought more uniformity than the method of certification by the individual preceptor. ”

“ It was in this environment of scholarship, with the oversight of an excellent teacher, and in association with other boys of capability and ambition coming from a wide area, that Marcus Whitman developed the ambition to rise above the intellectual level of his direct ancestry and become a professional man. Since the major influence in the school was toward the ministry it was natural that Marcus Whitman's early ambition tended toward that career. ”

“ In Rushville, New York, the town of Marcus Whitman's birth and of his residence from the age of eighteen to the age of twenty-three, there was a single village physician. He was Dr. Ira Bryant. Of his high qualities as a man, and his skill as a physician through thirty-five years of practice there is abundant record. It is probable, although not certain, that he never attended a medical college.
Dr. Ira Bryant was both as a man and a physician a favorable influence upon Marcus Whitman. When they came into the relation of preceptor and student Dr. ”

“ He graduated in medicine at the University of Edinburgh in 1817. In 1825 Dr. McNaughton, then thirty-one years of age, had been a member of the faculty for five years. He had a long subsequent career in teaching, with a constantly increasing reputation.
It is evident that Marcus Whitman chose to enter a school with a distinguished group of capable, well-educated, and experienced teachers. At that time this faculty had a high reputation throughout the country and by some reliable contemporary writers was stated to be the best medical faculty in the United States. ”

“ The doctor must be a good horseman and have a good horse, for when called he was expected to hasten. Returning from one call with a tired horse he might find another call to which he must also hasten and this required a fresh horse. The busy doctor must keep more than one horse. ”

“ Then he returned to his medical college, able by reason of his practice to appreciate fully the teaching under a group of familiar teachers of the highest teaching proficiency, and in a school especially devoting itself to training men for practice of the frontier. ”

“ Hay, oats, wheat, potatoes, fruit, cider, maple syrup, live animals such as sheep and pigs, dressed beef and pork, cheese, butter, and cord wood, and in merchandise-cloth of various kinds, yarn and dressed leather. ”

“ In its first year it had seven professors, forty students, and a hundred and one trustees. It had no connection with any other teaching educational institution. It was the first "independent medical school” in America.
In 1802 in Fairfield, Herkimer County, New York, a village of two hundred people about sixty miles west of Albany, was established (incorporated in 1803) an academy of the type common in New England. To it in 1808 came as a teacher of chemistry Dr. Josiah Noyes, a graduate in both arts and medicine at Dartmouth. ”

“ Thus on May 9, 1826, Marcus Whitman, not yet twenty-four years of age, became a legal practitioner in the state of New York. The law then prescribed that a man must have studied medicine three years before he could be licensed; therefore this document is proof that Marcus Whitman studied under his preceptor, Dr. ”