Page:Samuel F. Batchelder - Bits of Harvard History (1924).pdf/239

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Hospital-Surgeons of 1775
177

lutionary leaders was more admired and trusted. He had a charming personality, and was a great favorite with Washington. His appointment as head of the new department was received with universal applause.

Yet somehow under his administration the reorganizing of the hospital did not get forward. Everything, as Dr. Warren wrote, remained “in a fluctuating state.”[1] Like the true politician of all ages and countries, Church apparently centred his interest in the patronage he was able to dispense; and inasmuch as his selections consisted largely of Harvard men, we may opine that they were the best results of his incumbency!

His ideas of economic efficiency were so vague that he hopelessly overran his allowance of surgeons. He not only retained Foster, Warren, Aspinwall, Hayward, and Rand, but appointed three more. Of these, Samuel Adams, Jr., of the class of 1770, has already been mentioned in the old “Anatomical Society.” He owed his assignment largely to his father’s influence, but proved to be not without merit of his own. He stood by the Medical Corps manfully for almost all the war, and finally rose to be senior surgeon in 1780. He then came home to Quincy, greatly broken by hardship and ex-

  1. Warren to Hancock, Cambridge, October 9, 1775. Life of John Warren, 55.