said a few years before, “by a long series of troubles and perplexities and infirmities of age.”[1]
Amos Windship was a good type of the “slow but sure” student. Born in Holliston of humble parentage, by the time he was twenty-six he had succeeded in obtaining his A.B. in the class of 1771. After a year in the hospital he shipped as a naval surgeon on the Alliance, in the squadron of the redoubtable John Paul Jones, and remained afloat until the end of the conflict. He then visited England, and was elected a member and corresponding fellow of the London Medical Society. Like various others in the medical branch, his war-time experiences fired him with zeal to improve his professional education; he entered the newly-opened Harvard Medical School, and was a member of the third class graduated there, receiving his M.B. (then conferred before the M.D.) in 1790. To say that he stood second in his class is but paradoxical praise, since the class consisted of only two. Boston practice he seems to have found a grade above him; for, after trying it awhile, he removed to the less crowded field of Wellfleet. But still he was plodding on towards his full degree. At last, in 1811, he succeeded in passing the examination, and
- ↑ See Gurney, “History of Hanson,” in Hurd’s History of Plymouth County, 349; Marsh, Genealogy of the Hitchcock Family, 432 (whence also the portrait here reproduced); Pension Office Records, Revolutionary Claim S. 1831.
