Page:Samuel F. Batchelder - Bits of Harvard History (1924).pdf/237

 impetuosity and advanced ideas seem to have militated against him; he suffered from a course of systematic snubbing; after loyally following the fortunes of the Medical Corps for several years, he was deliberately overlooked by the Continental Congress in the reorganization of the department. This was the last straw, and he returned to Boston, where he received the honorary M.D. in 1786, and became the foremost surgeon of his time, founder of the Harvard Medical School, and first Hersey Professor of Anatomy and Surgery.

By the end of July, 1775, the above group of Harvard men (with Samuel Whitwell, a Boston boy who had inexplicably gone to Princeton and graduated there in the previous year, and who was now mate to Dr. Hayward), together with a few lesser lights, made up a hospital staff of six surgeons, four mates, and a “medical commissary and apothecary,” young Andrew Craigie, for whom Craigie Street in Cambridge is named. This aggregation, generally denominated the “colony hospital,” was under the theoretical supervision of its creator, the Massachusetts Provincial Congress; but it was very loosely organized, was poorly managed by Foster (who indeed had no specific authority over it), was full of