never attempted to deny its authorship) was enough for the outraged patriots. Church was solemnly tried before the bar of the House, found guilty, expelled from his seat, and cast into durance vile. There he languished until January of 1778, when he was allowed to go aboard a vessel bound for Martinique. She was never heard from again.[1]
In electing his successor Congress was careful to make no second mistake, and on October 17 chose Dr. John Morgan, a member of the earliest class ever graduated from the “College of Philadelphia” (now the University of Pennsylvania), in 1757.[2] He was precisely the man for the place—forty years of age, highly educated, an M.D. of Edinburgh in 1763, well-to-do, a born organizer, with military and hospital experience in Europe as well as America, a strict disciplinarian, fearless and conscientious to a really embarrassing degree—and he rapidly brought the Medical Department to a high state
- ↑ As the first “traitor” to the American cause, Church occupies a very purple patch in sundry standard histories and memoirs which it would be tedious to enumerate. His principal doings as Medical Director he sets forth, in characteristically flamboyant style, in a long letter to Samuel Adams, dated “‘Continental Hospital, Cambridge, Aug. 28, 1775,” and to be found in the Adams MSS. at the New York Public Library.
- ↑ See biographical sketch prefixed to his Journal, Rome to London, 1764; Am. Journal of Pharmacy (1904); his own Vindication, etc.; Boston Gazette and Country Journal, January 15, 1776; Norns, Early History of Medicine in Philadelphia, 46; Thacher, Medical Biographies, i, 405; Force, American Archives, 4th Series, iv and v, passim; Mumford, Narrative of Medicine in America, 126; North American Medical and Surgical Journal, iv, 362.
