Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 37.djvu/130

 1827, succeeded Dr. Joseph White as president of the faculty. In 1827, Dr. John Dalamater (1787-1867) became professor of surgery at Fairfield, remaining there until the school closed its doors in 1840. He then transferred to Geneva as professor of materia medica and general pathology. In 1837 he began to give lectures also in the short-lived Willoughby Medical School, twenty miles east of Cleveland, Ohio, although he returned to Geneva each winter to give his lectures there. In 1843 he moved to Cleveland, Ohio, where he became first dean of a new school there begun, which is the present Western Reserve Medical School. Delamater is described as an inspiring teacher and in thirty-eight years of teaching in no less than nine different medical schools he exercised a very wide influence on the medical education of his time in the United States.

When Dr. Lyman Spalding resigned from the faculty in 1816, Dr. Joseph White appears to have succeeded him as professor of anatomy. He apparently also taught surgery, and is described "as the greatest surgeon in this Western District" (of New York). It was evidently under Dr. White's instruction that Whitman and the other Oregonians who attended Fairfield learned anatomy and surgery.

Dr. T. Romeyn Beck was another distinguished member of the Fairfield faculty. He gave his introductory lecture there on December 13, 1824. How long he remained I have been unable to ascertain.

It seems clear then that Marcus Whitman was a student of at least two outstanding members of the Fairfield faculty, Willoughby and Delamater. Gray and H. H. Spalding must have had some courses with the same men. W. C. McKay, only fourteen years old when be entered Fairfield, may have enrolled only in the academic department.

At the time that the medical school was founded in 1809, Fairfield was a village of about 2000 inhabitants. However, it was located on a hill and when the Erie canal was built through the Mohawk Valley the village was left high and dry, away from the main path of progress. Other schools, especially that at Geneva, became real competitors for both students and faculty,