Part 4: Doctors at War
“. . . the necessity of cultivating Medical Knowledge in America . . .”
In 1765, even as Pennsylvanians were embroiled in the Stamp Act crisis, two young doctors, John Morgan and William Shippen, Jr., published a novel proposal: a course of lectures on anatomy and materia medica for students of the College. At the College’s Commencement that year, Morgan laid out plans to open a medical school within the institution, the first of its kind in the colonies. It would closely emulate Scottish and English schools. When it opened, the existence two upper-division schools, Philosophy and Medicine, qualified the institution as a “university.”
Over time, the Medical School attracted students from across the colonies, particularly the mid-Atlantic and the South. Yet, as in the College, personal rivalries, and religious and political differences, profoundly shaped its direction. Morgan had proposed a school that would reflect “the growing hopes of the country” and the empire—it would instead refract the social conflicts within the city and the colonies.
Four individuals dominated, and competed: Morgan, Professor of the Theory and Practice of Physic; Shippen, Professor of Anatomy; Benjamin Rush, Professor of Chemistry; and Adam Kuhn, Professor of Botany. Morgan, Shippen, and Rush all had their first formal schooling in a Presbyterian academy led by Rev. Samuel Finley in West Nottingham, Maryland. All four apprenticed under Philadelphia doctors and received medical degrees from the University of Edinburgh. Morgan, an Anglican, and Shippen, a Presbyterian, were sons of the new Philadelphia elite, while Rush was an evangelical Presbyterian from a modest farming family and Kuhn was of Pennsylvania German ancestry.
Even the origins of the school were disputed. Morgan had support from Proprietor Thomas Penn and Provost William Smith, but Shippen, whose father William was a doctor and founding Trustee, felt he deserved equal credit. During the Revolution, Morgan and Shippen both served as chief physicians to the Continental Army. Each was demoted and faced severe criticism of their management, and their battles continued in the press.
Rush became a leader of the radical Pennsylvania faction in 1776 and a signer of the Declaration, but he later adopted a more conservative stance in opposition to the new Pennsylvania government. Both Rush and Kuhn refused to sign the 1777 “Test Oath” declaring support for the 1776 Pennsylvania Constitution. Kuhn, however, was accused of Loyalism, fleeing Philadelphia after the British occupation had lifted and only returning to teaching in 1781.[1] Rush became controversial for his opinions on race and for some of his treatment practices. The two argued publicly during the devastating Yellow Fever epidemic of 1793.
Famously depicted by William Birch down the street from the Library Company of Philadelphia, “Surgeons’” or “Anatomical” Hall on Fifth Street was used for medical lectures beginning in 1791. The land was granted to the University during the Revolution, after properties belonging to Academy and College graduate, Trustee, and Loyalist Andrew Allen were seized by the state. Note also the wooden houses standing next to the domed lecture theater; some of which were rented out by the University to Black residents.[2]
Just after his graduation in 1763 from the University of Edinburgh, John Morgan left for a “grand tour” of the European continent (the Kislak Center possesses a travel journal from this tour). During the summer of 1764, he was in Rome with his friend Samuel Powel, studying art and socializing with British expatriates. They became acquainted with the young, celebrated Swiss portrait painter Angelica Kauffmann, later a founder of the Royal Academy in London, and Kauffmann prepared sketches and a painting of Morgan.[4]
In the increasingly “professionalized,” male-dominated spaces of medical education, women had no formal place. Initiating a “Course of Lectures in Midwifery” in January, 1765, Shippen argued that these were rendered necessary by the mistakes of midwives, whom he calls “unskilful Old Women.” However, Shippen does advertise his “Lectures in Midwifery” to women as well as men, proposing that he would teach each separately. He also proposes to sponsor housing for “a few poor Women.”[5]
Morgan and Shippen’s announcement of their formal “Courses of Lectures” in “Anatomy and Materia Medica” ran in successive issues of The Pennsylvania Gazette. This issue of October 31, 1765, has a elegy-like black border included by printer David Hall to alert his readers to the impending Stamp Act, “the most UNCONSTITUTIONAL ACT that ever these colonies could have imagined.”
Although Shippen and Morgan advertised their new program jointly, Morgan claimed credit for the initiative in his 1765 commencement address. Also present here is Shippen’s defense against the charges of grave-robbing to find cadavers for his dissections. He claims to use the bodies of suicides, of executed criminals, and “now and then one from the Potters Field” [now Washington Square], where many Blacks and the poor were interred. Shippen faced ongoing criticism for his procurement of bodies and continued to defend himself in the newspapers.[6] In the 1780s members of the free Black community petitioned for the erection of a fence around the Potters Field.[7]
In early 1765, Penn wrote to the Trustees in support of Morgan and the creation of a School of Medicine. Like a decade earlier at the establishment of the College, the sanction of Pennsylvania’s Proprietor granted political backing and financial support to the new school. Friendship gave Morgan an edge over William Shippen, Jr.: Morgan, an Anglican and member of the first College class (1757), was one of Smith’s first Philadelphia students.[8] This letter helped secure Morgan’s appointment as the first Professor of the Theory and Practice of Physik.
Funding for the new medical school, as for the College, was limited, and Morgan’s 1772 voyage to Jamaica and the West Indies was aimed at recruiting students and funders for both. He raised £860, a significant sum.[10] In this broadside announcement, Morgan describes the progress of his school, “a Seminary which is now entitled to the name of an University.” He addresses his audience as “Friends of Liberty and Science” and repeats how science and learning will flourish under “that genial influences with Liberty breath[e]s.” Surely the irony of Morgan’s insistence on “Liberty” was not entirely lost on the Jamaican slaveholding planter elites whom he was meeting.
This broadside reveals the deep animosity between Morgan and Shippen, and their public battles during the Revolution. Morgan was appointed chief physician to the Continental Army in 1775 but created more dissension than unity and was dismissed in 1777. After an inquiry, he was cleared of wrongdoing in 1779. Shippen, previously under his orders, was appointed in his place. Morgan accused Shippen of negligence and corruption, and he was court-martialed. On this broadside, Morgan has assembled favorable testimonies. He proclaims his own “unwearied attention to the public good” while announcing Shippen’s “forced resignation.”
This is one of eighteen drawings sent in 1762 to the Pennsylvania Hospital by London doctor John Fothergill, along with anatomical casts, to be displayed during anatomy lectures. Van Rymsdyk was a skilled medical artist who illustrated works by prominent physicians William Hunter, William Smellie, and others. These were likely used by students of the Medical School who were required to complete clinical training at Pennsylvania Hospital.
Bell, “Physicians and Politics in the Revolution: The Case of Adam Kuhn…” ↑
Parish, “Surgeons’ Hall”; University rental ledgers: JMD. ↑
CHECK Addison, Agnes, ed., “Portraits in the University of Pennsylvania,” Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1940. See: https://www.si.edu/object/john-morgan-1735-1789-painting:siris_ari_58508↑
Bell, John Morgan, 87: Morgan’s meetings with Kauffmann. On Kauffmann, see Cypess, Women and Musical Salons in the Enlightenment, 235ff. The original Kauffmann painting is at the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution: https://npg.si.edu/object/npg_NPG.78.221 ↑
Shryock 24. ↑
Corner, William Shippen, Jr., 102, citing Scharf and Westcott 2:1587 (see below). Bell, “Body-Snatching in Philadelphia,” reprints the Pennsylvania Gazette texts of January 11, 1770 in which Shippen defends himself and is defended by his students, but Bell does not cite evidence of a riot or riots. Willoughby, “Anatomy and Anatomy Education,” Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia, cites “a mob of sailors” in 1765, without a source. Norris, The Early History of Medicine in Philadelphia (1886), 39: mentions “mobbing” and that “windows broken” “on several occasions,” without source. Randolph Shipley Klein, “Shippen, William, Jr.,” American National Biography: “Rocks shattered windows in his lab and nearby public lamps, and mobs burst into his dissecting rooms, for some believed rumors that Shippen robbed graves, while others found male midwifery offensive.” Klein, Portrait of An Early American Family: The Shippens of Pennsylvania, 123: “On at least one occasion William Shippen III felt compelled to deny rumors that he engaged in grave robbing. Not all were convinced; opposition to his activities found periodic expression in well-aimed missiles which shattered windows in his laboratory and nearby public lamps”: p.123n81, citing Pennsylvania Gazette 11 January 1770. Watson, Annals, 1857, 2:379–80: reminiscences of the site; no reference to mobs. The first reference to violence and sailor violence may be in Scharf and Westcott, History of Philadelphia 1609–1884 (Philadelphia: L. H. Everts & Co., 1884), 2: 1587: Shippen “was one time near being subjected to the loss of his house . . . The outcry was chiefly among the sailors.” ↑
Lindsey Randall, “William Shippen, Jr.,” Penn and Slavery Project 2022, citing Nash, Forging Freedom, 94: petition of free Blacks to fence the Potter’s Field. ↑
Bell, John Morgan, 110–111. On Morgan’s links to Thomas Penn in London, see Bell 50. ↑
Bell, John Morgan, 121–122. ↑
Cheyney 68–9. ↑
Snyder, City of Philadelphia, 134–5. ↑