Page:A cyclopedia of American medical biography vol. 1.djvu/329

 CUTTER !

studied medicine and practised it with success the rest of his life. His legible handwriting hand long attracted atten- tion, and he was for that reason, among others, chosen agent for the town and was repeatedly delegated to the General Court at Boston. Another office held was that of Indian agent, and while thus serving he compiled a vocabulary of words in two Indian languages, Pequot and Ossipee, a work of great value in bargaining with the natives. Dr. Cutter must have been of a patient nature and genial in his manners or he would not have been chosen for this post in which so much dominating suavity was needed in those troublous times.

When the first expedition against Louisbourg was determined upon, Dr. Cutter was chosen captain and surgeon, and sailed with Col. Moulton's York Regiment in March, 1745. His medical services during the campaign were highly commended, and after the capture of the fortress he was left in charge as surgeon- in-chief and commanding officer. The autumn of 1745 was sickly with fever, which became epidemic in February, 1740, and in March Dr. Cutter fell its victim, leaving considerable property, for one of his sons inherited for his share alone a thousand acres of woodland and seventy English sovereigns.

Among North Yarmouth documents of this era, very curious are those relating to the Parson's wood lot, which one would think Mr. Cutter would have abandoned on resigning his pastorate. But he argued that the people had not paid his salary, and until paid he should hold on to the lot. Moreover, as a settler he was entitled to a lot which he had never received and until the town made over that to him he should hold on to the parson's. To such settlement the parties could never agree. His widow petitioned the General Court to the same effect, and while waiting for a decree cut off the best of the timber.

This first Dr. Ammi Ruhamah Cutter, as we have a right to entitle him aJ several years of medical practice and his

7 CUTTER

Colonial War record, left four children, one of whom was Dr. Ammi Ruhamah Cutter of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, cele- brated in the Colonial and Revolutionary Wars and in medicine in New Hampshire. J. A. S.

Cutter Genealogy.

Baxter. Documentary History of Maine.

Cutter, Ammi Ruhamah (1735-1S20).

Celebrated for his Colonial War and Revolutionary medical services, Ammi Ruhamah Cutter was born in North Yarmouth in the district of Maine March 15, 1735, and graduated at Harvard in the class of 1753. While there he made the acquaintance of a number of young men from Portsmouth, particularly that of John Wentworth, afterwards Sir John, governor-royal of the province of New Hampshire, with whom he maintained a very intimate friendship and to whom he was body physician until the governor was exiled to Halifax at the beginning of the Revo- lution. These college boys probably suggested to Cutter that he should study medicine with Dr. Clement Jackson who had lately moved to Portsmouth from Hampton, New Hampshire. At all events, as early as 1754 we find a letter from John Wentworth, still at Cam- bridge, addressing Cutter as doctor, although he was then less than twenty years of age.

Although Dr. Cutter had ridden about with Dr. Jackson for some time and had often been sent many miles collecting bills for his preceptor, in which expeditions he got nothing but ill treatment, his first case only came to him September 21, 1755, when he removed nine bits of bone from the leg of a wounded negro and in his diary wrote these famous words, "I did 1 1 myself."

Though very young, he was appointed in that year surgeoo for the rangers, and in 1750 wint willi Col. Meserve's regi- ment on the expedition against Ticon- deroga.

Early in 1757 he was reappointed surgeon and in April set out for New