hen into a black, powder. Blood-letting in some inflammations, fasting
in the early stage of fevers, and some of those peremptory drugs with
which most of us have been well acquainted in our time, the infragrant
memories of which I will not pursue beyond this slight allusion, are
among his remedies.

The Winthrops, to one of whom Dr. Stafford's directions were
addressed, were the medical as well as the political advisers of their
fellow-citizens for three or four successive generations. One of them,
Governor John of Connecticut, practised so extensively, that, but for
his more distinguished title in the State, he would have been remembered
as the Doctor. The fact that he practised in another colony, for the
most part, makes little difference in the value of the records we have
of his medical experience, which have fortunately been preserved, and
give a very fair idea, in all probability, of the way in which patients
were treated in Massachusetts, when they fell into intelligent and
somewhat educated hands, a little after the middle of the seventeenth
century:

I have before me, while writing, a manuscript collection of the medical
cases treated by him, and recorded at the time in his own hand, which
has been intrusted to me by our President, his descendant.

They are generally marked Hartford, and extend from the year 1657 to
1669. From these, manuscripts, and from the letters printed in the
Winthrop Papers published by our Society, I have endeavored to obtain
some idea of the practice of Governor John Winthrop, Junior. The learned
eye of Mr. Pulsifer would have helped me, no doubt, as it has done in
other cases; but I have ventured this time to attempt finding my own
way among the hieroglyphics of these old pages. By careful comparison
of many prescriptions, and by the aid of Schroder, Salmon, Culpeper, and
other old compilers, I have deciphered many of his difficult paragraphs
with their mysterious recipes.

The Governor employed a number of the simples dear to ancient women,
--elecampane and elder and wormwood and anise and the rest; but he also
employed certain mineral remedies, which he almost always indicates by
their ancient symbols, or by a name which should leave them a mystery
to the vulgar. I am now prepared to reveal the mystic secrets of the
Governor's beneficent art, which rendered so many good and great as well
as so many poor and dependent people his debtors,--at least, in their
simple belief,--for t