In the general trepidation proper surgeons and nurses could not be procured, and Foster was fain to collect a group of Harvard undergraduates, mere boys in their teens, to make shift as “surgeons’ assistants.” As college had already been adjourned, in order to give up the buildings to the soldiery, he had little difficulty in securing volunteers from the students who were hanging about the camp. Among them were Elijah Jones of Stoughton,[1] who was just finishing his senior year, but who, in the universal dislocation of the routine, never received his degree; Benjamin Stone of Shrewsbury, a member of the class of 1776, who afterward became the first master of Leicester Academy; Timothy Harrington of Lancaster, also a junior, who, profiting by the experience then gained, took up the study of medicine and was for many years the doctor at Chelmsford;[2] Isaac Hurd of Charlestown, another Junior, who likewise became a doctor, practising at Billerica and subsequently at Concord. The last-mentioned attained considerable professional prominence, which was recognized by an honorary M.D. in 1819.[3] Isaac Mansfield, Jr.,[4] of ’67, is
- ↑ See his petition for compensation in Mass. Archives, 188/178.
- ↑ Waters, History of Chelmsford, 802, 815.
- ↑ See Centennial of the Social Circle in Concord, 164; Harv. Grad. Mag., xxvii, 509; Toner, Medical Men of the Revolution, 28; Pension Office Records, Revolutionary Claim S. 1769
- ↑ An interesting letter from Mansfield is preserved among the Bourne MSS. in the Harvard Library. It is dated August 12, 1775. He was then in Topsfield, but had evidently just quitted Cambridge, and gives the latest
