BARTLETT
51
BARTLETT
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 Institute, at Pittsfield, and in 1839 was appointed to the chair of practice in Dartmouth College, Han- over, 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, at that time the strongest and best equipped school in the West, but became pro- fessor of the theory and practice of medicine at the University of Maryland in 1844, and of materia medica and ob- stetrics in the Vermont Medical College, the session of which began in March and continued for thirteen weeks. Among his colleagues were Alonzo Clark, Palmer and Edward M. Moore, and later, John C. Dalton.
On March 13, 1849, he received the ap- pointment 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 satisfac- tory, and a new school had been started in opposition to the University, and 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 Univer- sity of New York. The appointment of the former to the chair of the institutes and practice of medicine is dated Sep- tember 19, 1850.
Among his colleagues in the Univer- sity were Draper, Martyn Paine and Granville Sharp Pattison. Things do not seem to have worked very smoothly. In the spring of 1851 overtures were made to him from the College of Physi- cians 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 follow-
ing 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 Med- ical Students' Gazette," only three num- bers 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 and J. B. Flint in a much more pretentious and important journal, the "Medical Magazine," 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 Physi- cians of Paris," translated from the French of J. L. H. Peisse. Of the nine lives, those of Dupuytren and Brous- sais 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 con- tributions 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 to- day 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.
