After the great discovery of Edward Jenner societies were formed for the promotion of vaccination all over the world. The earliest vaccination in the United States was performed by Dr. Waterhouse (born 1754, died 1846), who operated upon four of his own children in 1800.
It was during the eighteenth century that a number of our best-known educational institutions were founded in the different colonies,--among them, Yale College, in 1701; Princeton (College of New Jersey), in 1746; University of Pennsylvania, in 1749; Columbia (King's College), in 1754; and others, only a little less known. In most of these latter were established medical departments, but the method of apprenticing students to physicians was still in general observance, no preliminary education whatever, as a rule, being demanded. In 1766, however{ 280}, the New Jersey Medical Society ordained that no student be taken as an apprentice by any member of the society unless he had competent knowledge of Latin and some initiation in the Greek. About the middle of the century Drs. Bard and Middleton, in New York, and Dr. Cadwallader, in Philadelphia, began giving lectures in anatomy, while at Newport, Rhode Island, Dr. William Hunter, between 1754 and 1756,--a near relative of the famous Hunters of London, and a pupil of the elder Monro,--gave a course of lectures on human and comparative anatomy. Dr. William Shippen. Jr. (1736-1808),--a student of John Hunter's,--returned in 1762 to America, and gave his first course of lectures on anatomy and midwifery during the years immediately following. His lectures led to the formation of a Medical Department of the College of Philadelphia, in 1765, in which lectures were continued regularly until the winter of 1775, when the{ 281} War of the Revolution interfered. In July of 1776 Shippen was made Chief-Physician of the Continental Army, and in the following year was elected by the Provincial Congress Director-in-General of army hospitals. During the latter years of the war he returned to Philadelphia each winter, and delivered a course of lectures, shortened by the necessities of the case. Thus he was the first public teacher of midwifery in this country. He was ably seconded in his work by Dr. John Morgan (1735-1789),--also a pupil of Hunter and Monro, who received a prominent army appointment in 1775, but who, two years later, was unfortunately dismissed on charges{ 282} subsequently proved false. Shippen and Morgan were for some time the only professors in the Medical Department of the College of Philadelphia. In 1768 Kuhn--a pupil of Linnæus--was made Professor of Materia Medica and Botany; and Benjamin Bush, a year later, was given the Chair of Chemistry. The commencement of this institution occurred in 1768, when the degree of M.B. was given to seventeen graduates. In 1779 political reasons led to the abolition of the College of Philadelphia, the University of Pennsylvania taking its place. Ten years later the former institution was restored, and in 1791 the two institutions were united. The present Medical Department of the University of Pennsylvania is, therefore, the legitimate continuation of the first medical school in America.