Page:American Medical Biographies - Kelly, Burrage.djvu/439

NAME FULLER 417 FULTON education we know nothing. He is heard from in Leyden where he was a deacon of the church and became the friend of William Bradford, with whom he emigrated to America with the Pilgrims in 1620. He was thrown in contact with many learned men at Leyden, among them William Brewster. Before coming to America lie was thrice married, his last wife, who survived him, being Bridget Lee, of Ley- den. In the list of the passengers sailing on the "Mayflozvcr," Samuel Fuller is put down as physician, also in an account of the sick- ness in Gov. Endicott's Settlement at Salem, in 1628 (Bradford's "History of Plymouth Plantation") it is said: "Having no physician among themselves it was fortunate for those planters that Plymouth could supply them with one so well qualified as Dr. Fuller." Fuller was undoubtedly serviceable to the colonists during the epidemics of typhus and small-pox in 1621. He visited the sick in Plymouth, where he was deacon of the Rev. John Robin- son's Church, and also made journeys for the same purpose to Dorchester, Charlestown and Salem. In 1623 he was joined by his wife and daughter. Two children were born in America, Mercy and Samuel, and altogether he had seven. Dr. Fuller wrote to Gov. Bradford under date of twenty-eighth of June, 1630: "I have been to Matapan Ca part of Dorchester) and let some twenty of those people blood," and again writing to Gov. Bradford, his old friend, in 1630 he says: "I have had conferences with them all till I was weary. Governor Endicott is a goodly wise and humble gentleman and very discreet, and of a firm and good temper." It is plain that Fuller had a mighty influence for good in the affairs of the settlers and that he was a physician and not a preacher, as some- times alleged. Writers on this period agree, according to T. F. Harrington, that the profes- sional visits of Dr. Fuller among the Puritan settlements did much to dissipate the distrust and hostility of the Puritans, both at Salem and in England, to the Pilgrim settlement at Plymouth, thus promoting a disposition to emigrate to this country and at the same time fostering a vigorous growth of the colonies. He died with some twenty others in the small-po.x epidemic in 1633. His widow was held in high repute as a midwife, even re- ceiving a call to settle in that capacity in the town of Rehoboth, Massachusetts, in the year 1663. She declined, however, and died the following year. Dr. Fuller's son, Samuel, be- came a clergyman and was the first minister of the church in Middleboro, Massachusetts. Walter L. Burrage. Memoir by Thomas Francis Harrington, M. D., re- printed from the Johns Hopkins Hosp. Bull., vol. xiv, Oct., 1903, No. 151. Genealog. Reg. of the First Settlers in New Eng. John A. Farmer, 1829. Genealog. Diet, of the First Settlers of New Eng., James Savage, 1860. Amer. Med. Biog., James Thacher, 1828. Fulton, John (1837-1887). John Fulton, anatomist and surgeon, editor of the Canada Lancet, died of pneumonia June IS, 1887. Born in Southwold, Ontario, Febru- ary 12, 1837, the son of a farmer of Irish ori- gin and a woman of Scotch ancestry, he showed all the quickness of the one race and the shrewdness and perseverance of the other. His education was begun very young, and he continued at home on the farm until he was eighteen years of age, when his health, never robust, was such as to warrant him in seek- ing a less laborious and more congenial oc- cupation. He became a school teacher and evinced a rare power of making clear to every pupil the points which he himself saw clearly, a power which characterized him all through life in his subsequent career as a prominent professor of medical science. He began his medical studies under the supervision of Dr. J. H. Wilson of St. Thomas, and displayed great zeal and untiring industry in his pro- fessional studies, doing as much work in the way of study in a week as would take most young men a month to master. He entered the medical school and graduated in medicine at the University of Toronto, af- ter which he went to New York and became an attendant in Bellevue Hospital. Later he visited London, Paris and Berlin, following the great masters of those capitals around the hospitals, and increasing 'his already large store of professional knowledge. Shortly after his return to Canada he was married, in 1864, to Isabella Campbell of Yar- mouth, Ontario,. whose premature death in 1884 all but crushed his heart, and from the shock of which he never recovered. Dr. Fulton settled in Fingal. Ontario, and was given the profes- sorship in anatomy in the medical school of Toronto. In 1869-70 he lectured on physiology and botany, and in 1871 he accepted the pro- fessorship of physiology in Trinity Medical College, which he held until a few years before his death, when he took the ch^ir of surgery. This he filled until his death, and he was also one of the surgeons to the Toronto Gen- eral Hospital. In 1867 he completed his work on physiology.