# American Medical Biographies/Bartlett, Elisha

​Bartlett, Elisha (1804–1855)
Born at Smithfield, Rhode Island, October 6, 1804, Elisha Bartlett was singularly fortunate in his parents, who were members of the Society of Friends, strong, earnest souls, well endowed with graces of the head and of the heart.
At Smithfield, at Uxbridge, Mass., and at a well-known Friends' institution in New York, Bartlett obtained a very thorough preliminary education. Details of his medical course are not at hand, but after studying with Dr. Willard, of Uxbridge, Drs. Greene and Heywood, of Worcester, and Dr. Levi Wheaton, of Providence, and attending medical lectures at Boston and at Providence, he took his doctor's degree at Brown University in 1826, a year before the untimely end of the medical department.
In June, 1826, Bartlett sailed for Europe, and writing September 4, he speaks of attending every day at the Jardin des Plantes to hear the lectures of Cloquet and Cuvier.
In 1827, shortly after completing his twenty-third year, Bartlett settled at Lowell, then a town of only 3,500 inhabitants, but growing rapidly, owing to the establishment of numerous mills. This was his home for nearly twenty years.
​In 1832 he held his first teaching position, that of professor of pathological anatomy and of materia medica in the Berkshire Medical Institution, at Pittsfield, and in 1839 was appointed to the chair of practice in Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, the school founded by Nathan Smith in 1798.
In 1841 he accepted the chair of the theory and practice of medicine in the Transylvania University, Lexington, Ky., at that time the strongest and best equipped school in the West, but became professor of the theory and practice of medicine at the University of Maryland in 1844, and of materia medica and obstetrics in the Vermont Medical College, the session of which began in March and continued for thirteen weeks. Among his colleagues were Alonzo Clark, Benjamin R. Palmer and Edward M. Moore, and later John C. Dalton (q.v.).
On March 13, 1849, he received the appointment of professor of the theory and practice of medicine in the University of Louisville.
The condition of medical politics at that time in the town was not satisfactory, and a new school had been started in opposition to the University; among the Bartlett letters are a number from the elder Yandell which show a state of very high tension. Bartlett spent but one session in Louisville. He and Gross accepted chairs in the University of New York. The appointment of the former to the chair of the institutes and practice of medicines is dated September 19, 1850.
Among his colleagues in the University were J. W. Draper, Martyn Paine (q.v.) and Granville Sharp Pattison (q.v.). Things do not seem to have worked very smoothly. In the spring of 1851 overtures were made to him from the College of Physicians and Surgeons of New York, in which Faculty were his warm friends, Alonzo Clark and Willard Parker, and he was elected to the chair of materia medica and medical jurisprudence in the following year, 1852. Here he lectured during the next two sessions until compelled by ill health to retire.
Bartlett began his career as a medical writer with the Monthly Journal of Medical Literature and American Medical Students' Gazette, only three numbers of which were issued.
Among the articles in these three numbers there are some of special merit. One signed S. N., "On the Claims of Medicine to the Character of Certainty," may have suggested to Bartlett his well-known essay, "On the Degree of Certainty in Medicine."
In July, 1832, he became associated with A. L. Pierson (q.v.) and J. B. Flint (q.v.) in a much more pretentious and important journal, the Medical Magazine, Boston, a monthly publication which continued for three years.
In 1831 appeared a little work entitled, "Sketches of the Character and Writings of Eminent Living Surgeons and Physicians of Paris," translated from the French of J. L. H. Peisse. Of the nine lives, those of Dupuytren and Broussais are still of interest to us, and there is no work in English from which one can get a better insight into the history of medicine in Paris in the early part of this century.
Bartlett's claim to remembrance, so far as his medical writings are concerned, rests mainly on his work on "Fevers" issued in 1842, and subsequent editions in the years 1847, 1852 and 1857. It remains one of the most notable of contributions of American physicians to the subject. Between the time of Bartlett's visit to Paris and 1840, a group of students had studied under Louis, and had returned to this country thoroughly familiar with typhoid fever, the prevalent form in the French capital at that time.
As to the work itself, the interest today rests chiefly with the remarkably accurate picture which is given of typhoid fever—a picture the main outlines of which are as well and firmly drawn as in any work which has appeared since.
"An Essay on the Philosophy of Medicine," 1844, a classic in American medical literature, is the most characteristic of Bartlett's works, and the one to which in the future students will turn most often, since it represents one of the most successful attempts to apply the principles of deductive reasoning to medicine, and it moreover illustrates the mental attitude of an acute and thoughtful observer in the middle of the century.
In 1848 appeared one of Bartlett's most characteristic works, a little volume of eighty-four pages, entitled, "An Inquiry into the Degree of Certainty of Medicine, and into the Nature and Extent of its Power over Disease." The reception of the essay in certain quarters indicates how shocking its tone appeared to some of the staid old conservatives of the day. I came across a review of it in the Medical Examiner, November, 1848, from which I give the following extract: "This is a curious production, the like of which we have seldom seen from the pen of anyone who had passed the age of a sophomore. What makes it the more remarkable is the circumstance that the writer is a ​gentleman of education and experience and the author of works which have given him a wide reputation."
The last of Bartlett's strictly medical publications was a little monograph on the "History, Diagnosis and Treatment of Edematous Laryngitis," published in Louisville at the time he held the chair of practice at the University in 1850.
Bartlett was at his best in the occasional address. Perhaps the most characteristic is one entitled, "The Head and the Heart, or the Relative Importance of Intellectual and Moral Education," which is a stirring plea for a higher tone in social and political morality. In the same clear, ringing accent he speaks in his address on Spurzheim of the dangers of democracy. In a lecture on the "Sense of the Beautiful," delivered in 1843, Bartlett appears as an apostle of culture, pleading in glowing language for the education of this faculty.
One of the last of Bartlett's publications was "A Discourse on the Times, Character and Writings of Hippocrates," delivered as an introductory address before the trustees, faculty and medical class of the College of Physicians and Surgeons, at the opening of the session of 1852–53. The three pictures which he gives of Hippocrates as a young practitioner in the Isle of Thasos, at the death-bed of Pericles, and as a teacher in the Isle of Cos, are masterpieces worthy of Walter Savage Landor.
When at Louisville some obscure nervous trouble, the nature of which I have not been able to ascertain, attacked Dr. Bartlett. Against it in New York he fought bravely but in vain, and after the session of 1853–54 retired to Smithfield, his native place. The prolonged illness terminated in paralysis, but, fortunately, did not impair his mental faculties in the slightest degree. He died on the nineteenth of July, 1855.