Page:A cyclopedia of American medical biography vol. 1.djvu/396

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speech, with winning expression and considerate manner; he was able to attract all to his plans and interest them in his purposes, blending the most inharmonious elements into an efficient working force.

On August 10, 1897, he married Emma Adele Merritt, of Union City, Michigan, who survived him. He died on April 26, 1905, in the hospital at Ann Arbor, from chronic heart dis- ease.

Two of his papers were:

"The Public Care of Epileptics by Colonization." ("Transactions Michi- gan State Medical Society," 1884,

"The Early Recognition and Treat- ment of Insanity at Home." ("Trans- actions Michigan State Medical Society, 1899.) L. C.

Eliot, Jared (1685-1763).

He was eminent as a Congregational minister and famous as a physician, unquestionably the first physician of his day in Connecticut, frequently visiting every county therein, and often making professional visits to Newport and Boston.

Born in Guilford, Connecticut, No- vember 7, 1685, his father was the Rev. Joseph Eliot, whose great abilities as a divine, a politician and a physician were justly admired, not only among his own people, but throughout the colony. His grandfather was John Eliot, "Apostle to the Indians," an Englishman who landed at Boston, Massachusetts in 1631. The wife of the "Apostle" had great skill in physic and surgery. The grandson, Jared, married Hannah, daughter of Samuel and Elizabeth Smithson, who was a famous midwife in Guilford. From his father, Joseph, his grandmother, Ann, wife of the " Apostle," and from associa- tion with his wife, Hannah, and her mother, the midwife, Jared Eliot must have been in the way of acquiring many useful hints in the healing art.

He graduated from Yale College in 1706. Harvard College gave him the

3 ELIOT

honorary A. M. About 1756-7 he was unanimously elected a member of the Royal Society of London. He was trustee of his alma mater from 1730 till his death.

Seven of his printed sermons reveal unusual excellence in his chosen profes- sion, and a number of his printed essays upon agriculture show that he was a scientific agriculturist. So valu- able were they that they were printed in a volume in 1760.

In 1762 his "Essay on the Invention, or Art of Making Very Good, if not the Best Iron from Black Sea Sand," ap- peared. For this the Royal Society of London granted him a valuable gold medal inscribed for "Producing Malle- able Iron from the American Black Land," which then, and now, abounds on the shore of Long Island Sound at Clinton. The medal is in the posses- sion of a descendant at Goshen, New York.

Eleven children, nine sons and two daughters, were the result of his marriage. Three of the sons graduated at Yale College, two of them becoming physi- cians, who died young.

The portraits of himself and his wife by an unknown artist are preserved by a descendant at Clinton.

Much more might be said in regard to this very distinguished man of colonial Connecticut. " Dexter's Yale Biographies and Annals," "The Gene- alogy of the Eliot Family," "The Descendants of John Eliot," a new edition, and Dr. Gurdon W. Russell's "Early Medicine and Early Medical Men in Connecticut," and numerous other books and pamphlets contain lengthy articles in regard to him, but one of his communications in print shows in his own words the scientific spirit of the man more than any relation of what he did.

"The last week, in this place, a man at his work was troubled with a fly that attempted, and, notwithstanding all his endeavors to avoid it, entered his ear and went so deep that he could