Page:American Medical Biographies - Kelly, Burrage.djvu/406

NAME FIRMIN 384 FIRMIN and Ashland, acquiring rapidly an extensive reputation. In 1864 Dr. Firestone was called to the chair of obstetrics and the diseases ot women and children in the newly organized Charity Hospital Medical College in Cleveland, a chair which he exchanged in 1866 for that of the principles of surgery in the same col- lege. In 1879 he was once more transferred to the chair of gynecology, in which he con- tinued active until a short time before his death. In 1878 he was appointed superin- tendent of the Central Ohio Insane Asylum at Columbus, and managed to combine the duties of this position with those of a professor in the Wooster Medical College without detri- ment to either. At the close of his connection with Wooster he was made professor emeritus, and in 1874 received the degree of LL. D. from the University of Ohio, situated at Athens. He died of apoplexy at Wooster, No- vember 9, 1888, leaving a son. Dr. W. W. Fire- stone, who continued his practice in Wooster until he also died. Dr. Leander Firestone was president of the state medical society in 1859-60, and a member of the Boston Gynecological Society. In addition to his valedictory address to the Ohio State Medical Society ("Transactions of the Ohio State Medical Society," 1860), numerous papers from his pen are to be found, in the pages of contemporary medical journals. In 1839 he married Susannah Firestone and had two sons, William W. and M. O., who both became doctors. Henry E. Handerson. Columbus Med. Jour., vol. vii. Clev. Med Gaz., vol. iv. Firmin, Giles (1615-1697). Giles Firmin practised medicine all his life, although his chief reputation was gained as a religious writer and dissenting divine in England, after he was thirty years old. During his early manhood he served the inhabitants of Ipswich, Massachusetts, as physician, for six years, and he may have practised in Boston previously. He lectured on anatomy and his teaching stimulated the General Court to pass an act in 1647 reciting the necessity that "such as studies physick, or chirurgery may have liberty to read anatomy and to anatomize once in four years some malefactor in case there be such as the court shall allow of." In a letter to Governor Winthrop dated at Ipswich, February IS, 1640, Firmin says: "only for matter of employment I have as much here as I desire and love my planting more than it, only the highest ambition of my thoughts and desires are to be useful and ser- viceable here in a common way. We have divers very ill; and fluxes and fevers, I observe, are very dangerous." Firmin was born in the County of Suflfolk, England, in 1615. His father, Giles Firmin, was an apothecary of Sudbury who came to New England in the fleet with Winthrop, was chosen deacon of the church at Boston, and died in that town previous to October 6, 1634, being selectman at the time of his decease. The son studied at Cambridge, England, under the tutorship of Thomas Hill, D. D., entered Emmanuel College in 1629, but did not gradu- ate, accompanied his father to Boston and was admitted to the First Church before October 11, 1632, as established by the records of that church. Probably he returned' to England before the fall of 1634 and was a student under Dr. John Clerk (written also Clarke) of London (1582-1653), president of the Col- lege of Physicians, 1645-1649, for in a letter written by a Mr. Robert Harmer concerning a religious controversy, about the year 1645 we find this : "Quaeries put to some inde- pendents of C. (Colchester) upon an occasion of a sermon preached by Mr. F. (Firmin), an independent apothecary physician, some- time servant to Dr. CI. (Clerk) of London." In "The Real Christian," a popular book pub- lished by Firmin in England in 1670, and re- printed several times, he says that when his father died in the fall of 1634 he was "far dis- tant," meaning probably that he was at his stud- ies in England. It is likely that his father's death terminated those studies, for he says in his "A Serious Question Stated," a pamphlet : "Being broken from my study in the prime of my years, from eighteen years of age to twenty-eight, and what time I could get in them years I spent in the study and practise of physic in that wilderness till these times changed, and then I changed my studies to divinity." Firmin was in Boston in March, 1637-8, as he mentions being present when Mrs. Hutchin- son was excommunicated on the twenty-second of that month (Separation E.xamined, page 120). His name first appears in the records of the town of Ipswich, January 4, 1638-9, when he was granted by the freemen of that town, one hundred acres of land on condition that he would live there for three years. The town had been settled only five years and the number of inhabitants was small, for the town records tell us that in the first nineteen years, 1633 to 1652, the total number of male inhabitants over twenty years of age was 332. Therefore we are not surprised to learn by a letter to Governor Winthrop, under date of