PUTNAM
296
PUTNAM
a good Christmas present he proved to
his parents, for he became a noted physi-
cian and citizen, and left one son, Judge
A\'illiam LeBaron Putnam, of Portland,
Maine, a jurist noteworthy upon the
American bench.
Dr. Putnam's father was Israel Put- nam, a cousin of Cen. Putnam of the Revolution; his mother Hannah LeBaron, a descendant of Dr. Francis LeBaron, u great man in colonial days.
Lsrael Putnam, Jr., graduated from Brown University, Rhode Island, in 1827, studied with Prof. James McKenna of Topsham, Maine, and attended lec- tures at the Medical School of Maine, graduating in 1830. Instead of remain- ing in the same town with his perceptor, and trying to compete with him and divide the practice, as is the way in this century, young Putnam moved to Wells, Maine, and began practice there. After staying there four years, he married Miss Sarah Emory Frost, of Topsham, moved to Bath and stayed there for the rest of his life. He soon obtained positions of prominence, as a surgeon to the Marine Hospital, and City Physician; he was a member of Maine Medical Society, and the Maine Medical Association, and did excellent work in each.
In his later years he was often of great help to younger physicians, and once said to a young graduate, "Come and take that house next to me, and when they call me out in the night I will say, 'You had better go to doctor-so-and-so, across the street, he is a first-rate fellow, and wider awake at night than I am in the day time.' "
He, like every other doctor, had a favorite drug, hyoscyamus, a good supply of which he carried around with him in his pockets in the shape of a large black lump. When some patient would meet him in the street and say one of his women folks was '"sort of nervous like," he was sure to fish out the hyoscyamus, pinch out enough to make a few pills, roll them around in his hand and fingers as men do tobacco, and hand them to the old patient, who w^ould go off rejoicing.
When a physician can resign a ten
years' mayoralty (Bath), then resume
his practice, and get all he wants for
patients, it proves that he has made a
few friends. Looking at the portrait of
this w-ell known physician, you see a
large face, bright eyes, long lips smiling
at you from the corners, and you cannot
help feeling that you knew him in real
life.
After a prolonged illness of several months. Dr. Putnam died June 30, 1875, highly thought of and greatly missed.
J. A. S. Trans. Maine Med. Assoc.
Putnam -Jacobi, Mary (1842-1906).
Mary Putnam, born in London, Eng- land, August 31, 1842, was the eldest of the ten children of George Palmer Put- nam, publisher. She was descended on both sides from New England colonial stock and seven of her ancestors fought at Bunker Hill.
She was educated by her mother and by tutors, but not the least part of her education was gained from her literary environment. Her precocious intellect early set a high goal for her efforts and the study of medicine appealed most strongly, but together with it she wuelded then, and always, a most facile pen. Many of Mary Putnam's writings exist from her ninth year on; at seventeen she wrote a storj-, "Found and Lost," which was later accepted and published by the "Atlantic Monthly." This success al- most turned her from her early decision to study medicine. She began to teach at the age of nineteen to earn money for a medical education, and at the same time studied anatomy under private instruction. Gaining admission as its first woman student to the New York College of Pharmacy, she graduated in 1862. The following two years she spent at the Woman's Medical College of Phila- delphia, graduating in 1864. After one year spent as interne in the New England Hospital for Women and Children, she taught and wrote in New Orleans to con- tinue medical study in Paris, where she
