USA > Massachusetts > Essex County > Salem > Sketches about Salem people > Part 24
Note: The text from this book was generated using artificial intelligence so there may be some errors. The full pages can be found on Archive.org (link on the Part 1 page).
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14 | Part 15 | Part 16 | Part 17 | Part 18 | Part 19 | Part 20 | Part 21 | Part 22 | Part 23 | Part 24 | Part 25 | Part 26 | Part 27
Of more interest perhaps than in the case of so many of his fellow citizens whose fame rests upon more spec- tacular achievement, is Dr. Holyoke's appearance and his personal characteristics, so familiar to literally genera- tions of his fellow citizens. His portrait was painted at least three times, once when he was forty-five years old, a profile by Benjamin Blythe, and again when he was a hundred years old, by Osgood. In Dr. Bentley's diary there is a reference under date of January 19, 1818 to a portrait of Dr. Holyoke then being executed by Mr. Frothingham, and five years earlier he had referred to a miniature of the doctor which had just been executed by Hancock. The first two of these portraits are repro- duced in the Memoir of Dr. Holyoke published shortly after his death by the Essex South District Medical Soci- ety from which the greater part of the facts in the present account are taken. The Osgood portrait and the Froth- ingham portrait are in the Essex Institute in Salem. The Osgood portrait shows the same good forehead, long nose and chin of the earlier picture by Blythe, with fully as
11
BY RICHARD HALL WISWALL
much decision and character to the face as appeared in the representation made of the doctor fifty-five years be- fore. His face and his costume is characteristic of an old man but the shrewd eye and firm lips are far removed from the ordinary decay of a centenarian. "In person," says the Rev. Mr. Brazer in the discourse which he delivered at Dr. Holyoke's funeral in the North Church on April 4, 1829, "Dr. Holyoke was below the natural height but his form was symmetrical and admirably fitted for strength, endurance and activity. His countenance was strongly marked but its expression though decided was mild and agreeable and his whole deportment was at the same time dignified and conciliatory."
From the time when he was forty-five years old he had some impairment of vision which required the use of glasses for forty years, but at the end of that period his sight returned in full strength and from then until his death he was able to read fine print without the use of spectacles. In the latter part of his life he was quite deaf and this infirmity was a great trouble to him and deprived him of much of the pleasure which he always derived from the conversation of his friends. In his early years he was fond of dancing and of French litera- ture and the fine arts but indulged himself less and less in these diversions as he grew older and as they threatened to interfere with the practice of his profession. His only game was chess.
He had occasional attacks of illness but none of long duration or serious import. The only physical disability of which he spoke seriously apart from his deafness was an affection of his legs in the nature of cramps which he said he had always been subject to and which was apparently brought on by an occasional attack of indiges- tion. Dr. Bentley, in the winter of 1804, recorded that Dr. Holyoke fell upon the ice and was rendered sense- less but that he then appeared to be on the road to recov- ery. In a letter written to a friend in October 1828, the year before his death, he recounts in detail his habits, diet and daily routine which in his opinion had much to do with his long life of health and activity. It is
12
DR. EDWARD AUGUSTUS HOLYOKE
only because Dr. Holyoke's extraordinary length of life and his professional career in Salem are really the most outstanding facts about him that it is perhaps worth- while to refer to a few of his own observations about it.
:
When he first began to practice, so he wrote, he made his rounds to some extent on horseback, and in the latter part of his life he used a chaise. From the time that he was thirty until his eightieth year, however, except probably when weather or illness prevented him, he made his visits on foot and walked from five to six miles every day. He ate sparingly and of almost everything that was set before him having little interest in his food except for his extreme fondness for fruit of every kind. Coffee or tea with toast was breakfast enough, and bread, boiled rice and vegetables formed a large part of his midday meal. He was by no means a total abstainer but through- out his life was temperate and drank wine and spirits only sparingly. For the greater part of his life his usual drink was a mixture of rum, cider and water of which he drank half a pint with his dinner and another half pint in the evening. He smoked two pipes a day, one after dinner and again in the evening, and for eighty years held to the invariable habit of holding a small piece of pigtail tobacco in his mouth from breakfast until din- nertime and again throughout the afternoon. His only evening meal was tea with toast or bread and butter. He was so often called to see a patient after he retired at night that he soon found it convenient to sit up late in the evening which, as he says, occasioned his "lying in bed until a late hour in the morning, till seven in sum- mer and eight in winter." He admonishes his friend that "as to the passions, I need not tell you that when indulged they injure health; that calm, quiet self-posses- sion, and a moderation in our expectations and pursuits contribute much to our health and our happiness, and that anxiety is injurious to both."
The Reverend Dr. Brazer said that Dr. Holyoke joined easily in conversation but never took the lead in discus- sion and was careful to avoid a dictatorial air. He was habitually cheerful and light-hearted, occasionally playful
13.
BY RICHARD HALL WISWALL
and indulged and joined in sallies of gaiety and wit. "His passions were naturally strong, and his temper warm and excitable. But both were brought under severe control by a self-discipline which was never relaxed."
Dr. Holyoke's minister continues :
"He observed the strictest temperance in regard to every self-indulgence; but he distinguished this from utter abstinence, which is, comparatively, a cheap and easy virtue. He esteemed it no part either of wisdom or religion to deny himself a proper use of the good gifts of God; but he was resolutely guarded against every kind and degree of excess." It may perhaps be inferred that the Reverend Dr. Brazer himself had no fault to find with the worthy doctor's habits.
As might be expected from the surroundings in which Dr. Holyoke was brought up he was a deeply religious man. Throughout his early life he was a member of the First Church in Salem and with others of his friends left that church upon the illness of the elder Barnard. He was one of the founders of the North Church of which the younger Barnard was installed as minister, and was one of a Committee appointed to superintend the building of the new church. He was an invariable- attendant at services in the church and to the end of his life no day passed without religious devotions in his: family. He shared the liberalism which in the latter part of his life invaded many of the orthodox churches and although it is not to be gathered from Dr. Brazer's comments that Dr. Holyoke subscribed to the new the- ology of Channing, he belonged, again in Dr. Brazer's words, "To that class of Christians which are denomi- nated in the present-day Liberal, Catholic or Unitarian. He was educated in principles of faith different from these but after thorough and conscientious enquiry he adopted those which are known to be professed and enter- tained by the religious society which worships in this place." Dr. Holyoke after the Revolution was elected ruling elder of the North Church, and in 1805 he gave the church a silver tankard which is still in its possession.
Theology interested him far less than the influence of
14
DR. EDWARD AUGUSTUS HOLYOKE
religion upon conduct and in the last few years of his life he wrote an enumeration of the several duties which we owe contrasted on the opposite pages with their oppo- site vices. Some copies of this were printed for the use of his family and friends after his death and the docu- ment is printed in the Dictionary of the American Medi- cal Biography by Kelly & Burrage in the article devoted to Dr. Holyoke.
The Revolution was a painful period in Dr. Holyoke's life. Many of the friends with whom he passed his leisure hours at the Monday Night Club and with whom he dined and visited were unsympathetic with the Revo- lution and left Salem when the war broke out. Dr. Holyoke himself was doubtless influenced by the views of such of his intimate and influential friends as Colonel Pickman and although he could not himself be classed as a Loyalist he felt that the actual separation of the colonies from Great Britain was premature. He was, however, keenly alive to the grievances of the Colonists and as early as 1765 he gave evidence of his sympathy with the viewpoint of the Colonists by serving on a com- mittee appointed at a town meeting in Salem to draft instructions to its representative in the Legislature to do everything possible to obtain a repeal of the Stamp Act. His letters to his family in April of 1775 and the fol- lowing months were neutral in their tone with reference to the conflict upon which the colonies had just embarked, but he refers to the provincials as "our men" in describ- ing the Battle of Bunker Hill and seems gradually to have absorbed to some extent the partisan spirit about him. After the Battle of Lexington there was consid- erable fear in Salem of an armed attack and many people left town. Dr. Holyoke himself stayed in Salem and continued to practice his profession, and notwithstanding his lack of warmth for the Revolutionary cause such was the love and respect in which he was held that none of the indignities were visited upon him which fell upon so many others. He was, however, sufficiently alarmed at the disturbed condition of the town to send his wife and children to Nantucket which seems to have been
15
BY RICHARD HALL WISWALL
regarded as a sort of neutral ground which would be respected by both combatants. There assembled quite a colony of the families of inhabitants of Boston and sur- rounding places and Mrs. Holyoke and her children sailed for Nantucket on April 22, 1775 and lived there until their return shortly after the Battle of Bunker Hill. In his letters to her while she was away he speaks of the exodus of the inhabitants from Salem, and describes the great smoke plainly visible in Salem from the burning of Charlestown immediately prior to the engagement on the 17th of June.
It was at the beginning of the Revolution that Dr. Holyoke for one of the few times in his life involved himself somewhat unfortunately in political affairs. Va- rious distinguished citizens of Salem signed an address complimentary to Governor Hutchinson who was about to leave the country. This published address caused a considerable amount of popular resentment and shortly afterward some of those who had signed it, including Dr. Holyoke, found it expedient to publish a sort of retraction. This apology is referred to most charitably in the Memoir of the Medical Association but it must have been humiliating to Dr. Holyoke and a matter of deep regret to him that he had departed from his ordi- nary custom and made an excursion into a field with which he was unfamiliar. This retraction was signed by twelve persons and entitled, "Recantation of Toryism, Salem, May 30, 1775" and reads as follows :
"Whereas we, the subscribers, did sometime since sign an address to Governor Hutchinson which though prompt- ed to by the best intentions has nevertheless given great offense to our country; we do now declare that we were so far from designing by that action to show our. acqui- escense in those acts of Parliament so universally and justly odious to all America that on the contrary we hoped we might in that way contribute to their repeal though now to our sorrow we find ourselves mistaken. And we now further declare that we never intended the offense which this address has occasioned and that if we had foreseen such an event we should never have signed
16
DR. EDWARD AUGUSTUS HOLYOKE
it; as it always has been and now is our wish to live in harmony with our neighbors, and our serious deter- mination to promote to the utmost of our power the liberty, the welfare and happiness of our country which is inseparably connected with our own."
It is perhaps to be feared that Dr. Holyoke's name was of such influence and of such respect in the community that some of his acquaintances in their desire to add its weight to their cause had persuaded the doctor to a course which would ordinarily not have commended itself to his better judgment.
Only one other incident at all analogous to this comes to mind and that is largely discounted by the sympathies of the one who recorded it. Dr. Bentley notes in his diary under date of March 21, 1804:
"The Federalist caucus has induced the venerable Dr. Holyoke to lend his name in the Gazette to the party politics of this day. Thus the good Washington lent his name and lost the favor of the people and of pos- terity."
Dr. Bentley appears to have been a better minister and diarist than he was a prophet.
Toward the end of his life, Dr. Holyoke, together with other eminent citizens seemed to have been considerably upset by the increase in the use of "segars." Dr. Bentley remarks in 1811, "In Salem great care has been taken to discourage the use of segars in the streets and public buildings. The worthy Dr. Holyoke put himself at the head of this Committee which consisted of 36 members and who as inspectors have obliged themselves to give all their influence to execute the Bye law on the sub- ject. The excess had become extreme and the danger was very great from the careless use of fire in every situation. The Committee was one of the best ever employed upon such a concern." Dr. Holyoke infre- quently tried his hand at verse and in one of the last years of his life expressed his feeling about the use of segars in a short poem in which he contrasted that dis- reputable habit with early use of slender white tubes.
He was a member of the earliest of the Fire Clubs.
5
17
BY RICHARD HALL WISWALL
In 1799 this organization had lost its original function and seems to have been kept alive only as a social organ- ization and as a relic of the past. At that time Mr. Curwen withdrew at the age of eighty-five because of his deafness and the only members left besides Dr. Holyoke were Mr. Hiller and Mr. Robie, a contemporary and in- timate friend of Dr. Holyoke who had gone to Nova Scotia during the Revolution and who died in Salem some years later.
The Doctor was always observant of the habits of his fellow citizens and interested in the progress of Salem and was frequently called upon by others for his recol- lections of past events. He notes that in 1737 square- toed shoes were going out of fashion and that by 1740 buckles instead of shoe strings had become universal. He speaks of the prevalence in his youth of very broad hats and remembers his father wearing one with a brim seven inches wide, cocked triangularly. He was dis- turbed at the extravagant expenses of funerals prior to the Revolution and gives it as one of the causes of the enactment of the sumptuary laws. He was impressed with the fact that some twenty-five years before the Revo- lution the houses in Salem were very ordinary. The first handsome house, he says, was built by Jonathan Turner followed by Col. Benjamin Pickman's and then by Mr. Cabot's. A few chaises were kept by gentlemen but they were not apparently in common use. Salem at that time (about 1750) had from five thousand to six thousand inhabitants. The cod fishery was flourishing and commerce was chiefly with Spain and Portugal and the West Indies, especially St. Eustatia. The Doctor notes that in the autumn, the schooners took fish, rum and molasses to Virginia and Maryland, spent the winter retailing their cargoes and brought back corn, wheat, and tobacco. This cruise, he notes, was not ordinarily profit- able but served a purpose in keeping together the fishing crews which otherwise would have been scattered during the winter months.
Dr. Holyoke must have been intensely interested in the growth of the town after the Revolution. It surely
18
DR. EDWARD AUGUSTUS HOLYOKE
was a source of great satisfaction to him in his later years to witness the laying out of Chestnut Street and the building of the great houses along it, as well as the erection of Hamilton Hall. His own wife and daughter, as appears from frequent notes in Mrs. Holyoke's diary, attended regularly the Assemblies and the doctor often went with them. Mrs. Holyoke died at the beginning of the new century and the dancing parties which they attended in the Assembly Hall were probably held in the old Hall on Cambridge Street. It is possible that his unmarried daughter, Peggy, as well as Judith, who married Mr. Turner, may have attended assemblies in Hamilton Hall and perhaps the doctor went with them. In any event, at the celebration of the two-hundredth anniversary of the landing of Endicott, which was cele- brated with considerable ceremony in 1828 the venerable doctor presided at the banquet in Hamilton Hall. He was then one hundred years old and had lived the entire second century after the event in memory of which the guests were assembled. This was his last public appear- ance and followed closely upon the public dinner tendered him by his medical friends in honor of his hundredth birthday. It is perhaps of some interest in the light of recent events, that the Memoir on Dr. Holyoke published by the Essex South District Medical Society, shortly after his death, speaks of the celebration on September 13, 1828 as "The centennial anniversary of the settlement of the town."
Little has yet been said of Dr. Holyoke's professional life as a physician and yet it was his very life compared with which all his other activities were but incidents. The evidence is overwhelming that his fame rested not merely upon his length of service but more securely upon his skill as a physician. From his first discouraging days in Salem until a few weeks before his death some eighty years afterward he studied, experimented, kept in eager contact with the progress of the medical art in this country and abroad, contributed valuable discussions to medical journals, wrote records invaluable to his contem- poraries of his vast experience, practiced his own pro-
19
BY RICHARD HALL WISWALL
fession and taught others to practice it. For half a cen- tury he was, as Upham terms it, "The teacher of his profession." He kept his day books without interruption, recording all his professional visits, and in his active life- time he filled 120 such day books of 90 pages each, with the record of 30 visits on each page. For 75 years he averaged over 11 visits a day and in one epidemic he made over 100 visits each day for a period of several days. At one period it is said to have been literally true that there was not a single house in Salem which he had not visited professionally. He kept a daily record of every disease which came to his attention and later tabulated these records according to the different mal- adies, the incidence of disease and the percentage of fatality, and he continually urged upon other physicians the great use to the community of a general practice of making such records and giving to others the benefit of them. He compounded his own prescriptions, for in the early days of his practice, at least, a practical knowl- edge of pharmacy was an essential part of a doctor's qualifications. In this he was most neat and skilful and the demands upon his time must surely have been extraordinary. His prescriptions were for the most part based upon the use of four drugs, mercury, antimony, opium and quinine, and of these he prescribed many dif- ferent compounds. Always cautious where his patients were involved, he eagerly absorbed suggestions garnered from reported cases, and within the strictest limits of safety he experimented with his remedies and devised modes of treatment which were then new to the profes- sion and were used commonly for many years later . with the greatest benefit. No professional jealousy influenced him to keep these results to himself but he felt it a part of his duty to give the widest currency to everything which he discovered which might benefit the sick.
The unremitting application of the doctor to his daily work was extraordinary. From 1749 until his death, eighty years later, he never went further from home than on the occasion of one trip to Portsmouth which he made shortly after he first came to Salem, and was then
20
DR. EDWARD AUGUSTUS HOLYOKE
gone five days. When he married Miss Vial he was kept in Boston for about two weeks, and he occasionally visited his family or friends in Cambridge or Boston for a day or two. His longest absence from Salem was in 1764, when he was inoculated for the smallpox by Dr. Perkins in Boston. This was no trivial event in those days and Dr. Holyoke, after he had satisfied himself of the soundness of the practice, submitted himself to a pain- ful and disagreeable ordeal which had then hardly passed beyond the stage of experiment. For this he prepared himself for some days by medicine and diet and executed his will before he left his home for Boston on April 6, 1764. There he stayed recovering from his illness for twenty-nine days, the longest period that he was ever absent from his patients in his life, and was brought home on May 4th. In addition to his daily rounds of calls in Salem, he made frequent professional visits over a territory rather formidable in size for a general prac- titioner even in these days of motor cars. His wife's diary has frequent records of the doctor's visits at Cape Ann, Methuen, Ipswich, Boxford, Lynn and Reading, and occasionally it was necessary for him to spend the night. The smallpox in the middle of the eighteenth cen- tury was a frightful scourge, and Mrs. Holyoke records that two out of three who had the disease in the ordinary way died of it. On his recovery from his inoculation, Dr. Holyoke was vigorous in promoting the erection of a smallpox hospital where he inoculated some six hundred patients with only two fatal cases. Later, when vaccina- tion took the place of inoculation, Dr. Holyoke was one of the first to use it, although in his later years this duty seems largely to have been taken over in Salem by other physicians, among whom were Dr. Osgood, Dr. Parker, Dr. Little, and Dr. Paine. He was, however, as Bentley notes, frequently consulted in difficult cases by the younger doctors. He was a skilled obstetrician and so widespread was his attendance that during one period of ten years of his practice his records show that he delivered 946 babies.
Dr. Holyoke was not primarily a surgeon and, although
21
BY RICHARD HALL WISWALL
he was equipped and ready to perform minor surgical operations, he seldom was called upon to undertake an amputation or other major surgery. It is said that for a period of twenty-five years, great as his practice was, he never performed or witnessed the amputation of a large limb, but his qualifications to perform such an oper- ation are indicated by a bill which he rendered to the Colony of Massachusetts Bay during the Revolution for dressing the wounds of provincial soldiers, including the amputation of an arm. Doubtless the habits of the day and the occupation of the people at that time accounted in large part for the comparative scarcity of serious injuries.
One of the most important professional duties which Dr. Holyoke performed was the instruction of young physicians who came to live with him and learn the art of medicine in accordance with the practice of the day. He received pupils during almost the entire course of his professional career, and among them were numbered many eminent physicians and surgeons of the time, such as Dr. James Lloyd, Dr. John Warren, Dr. Nathaniel Walker Appleton, and perhaps the most famous of all, Dr. James Jackson, who, in later years, referred to him with affection and respect as his glorious old master who instilled into him accuracy of observation and modera- tion in treatment. In James Jackson Putnam's Biog- raphy of Dr. James Jackson, it is said of Dr. Holyoke, "This remarkable teacher was then the foremost physician in New England." Dr. Bentley in 1811 said in his diary, "Dr. Holyoke is the most interesting character of my own times in Salem, from his professional reputation and unspotted character and the warm affections of all our citizens," and Mr. Upham in 1868 referred to Dr. Holyoke's "professional practice of unrivalled duration, accompanied by careful observation and an admirable judgment, which made him the great oracle among physi- cians, large numbers of whom, from all quarters, gath- ered round him as the guide of their early studies." That his eminence as a physician was more than local is evi- denced by the fact that he was one of the thirty-one
Need help finding more records? Try our genealogical records directory which has more than 1 million sources to help you more easily locate the available records.