COFFIN 191 COFFIN
Coffin, Nathaniel, Sr. (1716-1766).
This pioneer among medical men was descended from Tristram Coffin of Brixton County, Devon, born in 1605. He came over with his wife Dionis Stevens and his mother and settled in Salisbury, Massachusetts. Ultimately he and his family moved to Nantucket for purely agricultural purposes. He became chief magistrate of that island in 1671 and at his death left seven children and sixty grand children.
Nathaniel Coffin was born in Newburyport, Massachusetts, in the year 1716, was educated in the common schools there, studied medicine under the guidance of Dr. Tappan, and went to practise medicine in Maine in 1738. In the year 1739 he married Patience Hale, by whom he had eight children, one of whom, Nathaniel Jr., became as celebrated in medicine as his father before him.
Dr. Coffin, Sr., before long obtained a large practice, covering Wells and Kennebunk on the west, to the Kennebec River settlements on the east, so that what with bad roads and endless miles of travel, his medical life was difficult beyond imagination. He was often called to operate upon patients who had been scalped by the Indians during the French wars, but who had partially recovered. By the Indians also, in return for professional services rendered them gratuitously when injured, wounded, or torn by wild beasts, he was universally respected, so that when he was compelled to pass through their territory on his way to white patients in the outlying settlements they always provided him with a safeguard and the best possible conveyance through almost pathless forests. The only operation done by him so far as recorded was ligation of the axillary artery in a case of injury to the arm of a man with his scythe when mowing. The man was regarded as dead, but after the ligature had been applied he gradually recovered.
Carrying on his work amid discouraging surroundings and far distant from opportunities to freshen his mind by study, he kept in touch with the progress of medicine by inviting to his hospitable home the young ship surgeons just out from England. Many of these had lately graduated from the famous London hospitals, and from them Dr. Coffin eagerly imbibed everything new. In return for this, he took them to see his patients, so that they could study something more than diseases occurring on board ship.
Excellent at the sick bedside, Dr. Coffin was better still as a surgeon, in practice, accidents, and emergencies.
The year of 1763, which found him but forty-seven, brought with it a slight stroke of paralysis, due to hard work and many years of exposure to a most inclement climate. Never knowing but that he might die any day, he persisted in sending to London his son Nathaniel, destined to become in later years one of the most brilliant ornaments of the medical profession of Maine.
This foresight was well rewarded, for the son went and returned well equipped and the elder man at the end had the pleasure of seeing his sacrifice rewarded, and when unable to do much work he handed it over to his son.
He died early in January, 1766, not quite fifty-five, and the name of Nathaniel Coffin, Sr., deserves perpetual remembrance in the annals of Maine, for he was a pioneer, skillful far beyond the average, and a man of extraordinary self-reliance. J. A. S. Thacher's Medical Biography.
Coffin, Nathaniel, Jr. (1744-1826).
A distinguished son of the first Nathaniel Coffin, Nathaniel Jr. was born in Portland, Maine, May 3, 1744, and after such education as the schools then afforded, studied the rudiments of medicine with his father. When nineteen he was sent to England where he walked the London hospitals under Hunter, Akenside, and others of medical fame, and returning home after nearly three years abroad, began to practise.
On the retirement and death of his
