Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 37.djvu/243

 years of successful practice. He might well have resumed practice at once, but instead he decided upon further formal education, by again attending a medical school. This shows his ambition for thorough education.

Again he chose the school at Fairfield. Its reputation had further increased in the five years since his previous attendance and at this time there were but two schools, out of the more than twenty in the United States, that had a larger attendance, and it was said by reliable contemporary writers that this school had the best medical faculty in the United States at that time.

On the first Tuesday in October, 1831, Dr. Whitman again entered the Fairfield Medical School. The length of the session was still sixteen weeks, the expenses were essentially the same, and the curriculum was not far different from that in 1825-26, but the teachers were more experienced.

The faculty was the same as five years before with one exception. Dr. Joseph White, the former professor of surgery, retired in 1827 when he reached the age of sixty-five years. His place as professor of surgery had been taken by Dr. John Delamater. There is evidence in later years that Dr. Whitman cherished this man more than any other one of the several capable teachers under whom he studied, and that Dr. Delamater had a profound influence upon him. We need therefore to know something of Dr. Delamater.

Dr. John Delamater was at this time forty-five years of age. He had already twenty-four years of experience in practice, and eight years experience as a medical professor. He had already held professorships in three medical colleges—Berkshire, Bowdoin, and Fairfield. During his teaching career of nearly forty years he held professorships in nine different medical colleges, all "country medical schools" except that at Cincinnati. Several of these professorships were held coincidently according to the custom of the times, three in a single year. He declined appointments both in Philadelphia and New York City because he was a believer in "country medical schools." With Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes in 1836 he reestablished Dartmouth Medical College which had become decadent. In 1843 he founded what is now the School of Medicine of Western Reserve University where he ended his teaching and where he died in 1867.