Medicine and Surgery in the United States.
The position of physician-general of the colony of Virginia was held one year by Lawrence Bohun, who arrived 1610; and afterwards by John Pot, the first permanent resident physician in the United States. Samuel Fuller, first physician of New England, arrived in the Mayflower in 1620, and Johannes la Montagne, first permanent medical settler in New Amsterdam, arrived 1637, followed the next year by Gerrit Schult and Hans Kiersted, while Abraham Staats settled at Albany prior to 1650. Lambert Wilson, a “chirurgeon” or surgeon, was sent to New England in 1629 to serve the colony three years, and “to educate and instruct in his art one or more youths.”| Anatomical lectures were delivered in Harvard College by Giles Firman be fore | 1647 |
| Earliest law to regulate practice of medicine in the colonies was passed in Massachusetts in 1649; adopted by New York | 1665 |
| Earliest recorded autopsy and verdict of a coroner's jury was made in |
| Maryland on a negro supposed to have been murdered by his master; surgeons received fees for “dissecting and viewing the corpse,” one hogshead of tobacco | Sept. 24, 1657 |
| Treatise on small-pox and measles published at Boston by Thomas Thacher; a sheet 15 1/2 × 10 1/2 inches—the first medical work published in America | 1677 |
| First quarantine act passed by the General Assembly of Pennsylvania | 1700 |
| First general hospital chartered in the colonies—Pennsylvania hospital of Philadelphia—organized 1751, opened | Dec., 1756 |
| Medical department, University of Pennsylvania, founded | 1765 |
| College of Physicians and Surgeons, medical department of King's College, New York, established | 1767 |
| First clinical instruction in America given by Thomas Bond in Pennsylvania hospital | 1769 |
| Term “doctor” first applied to medical practitioners or “physitians” in America (Toner） | 1769 |
| Medical department, Harvard University, founded | 1783 |
| Philadelphia Dispensary for the gratuitous treatment of the sick poor, first in the United States, established | 1786 |
| Earliest example of a special American Pharmacopoeia is a thirty-two-page work of William Brown, published at Philadelphia, and designed especially for the army | 1788 |
| “Doctors' mob” in New York | 1788 |
| New York Dispensary organized Jan. 4, 1791; incorporated | 1795 |
| Elisha Perkins, of Norwich, Conn., patents his “metallic tractors,” afterwards known as “Perkinism” | 1796 |
| First original American medical journal, the Medical repository, appears | 1797 |
| Medical department of Dartmouth College established | 1798 |
| First general quarantine act passes Congress | Feb. 23, 1799 |
| First vaccination in United States performed by Benjamin Waterhouse, professor in Harvard College, on his four children | July, 1800 |
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| First vaccine institute in the United States organized by James Smith in Baltimore, Md | 1802 |
| American Dispensatory published by John Redman Coxe | 1806 |
| Ovariotomy performed incidentally by Robert Houston in Glasgow (1701) and by L'Aumonier, in Rouen (1781), is performed by Ephraim McDowell, of Kentucky | 1809 |
| United States vaccine agency established by Congress (discontinued in 1822） | 1813 |
| Work on Therapeutics and Materia Medical, the first in the United States and best in the English language at that time, published by Nathaniel Chapman | 1817 |
| John Syng Dorsey, of Philadelphia, author of Elements of Surgery (1814), and first surgeon to tie the external iliac artery, died (aged 35） | 1818 |
| New York Eye and Ear Infirmary founded | 1820 |
| Pennsylvania Eye and Ear Infirmary, Philadelphia, founded | 1822 |
| Benjamin W. Dudley, founder of the medical department, University of Transylvania, Lexington, Ky., trephines the skull for epilepsy, probably the first instance in the United States | 1828 |
| Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary, Boston, founded | 1829 |
| Dispensatory of the United States of America, first published by Franklin Bache and George B. Wood | 1833 |
| Oesophagotomy first performed by John Watson, of New York; case reported | 1844 |
| Water-cures introduced into the United States by R. T. Trall, who opened a hydropathic institute in New York in 1844, and Joel Shew, at Lebanon Springs, N. Y. | 1845 |
| Left subclavian artery tied by J. Kearney Rodgers | 1846 |
| Collodion first applied to surgical purposes by J. Parker Maynard in Boston | 1847 |
| Elizabeth Blackwell graduated M. D. at the medical school of Geneva, N. Y. (the first woman in the United States） | Jan., 1849 |
| First excision of the hip-joint in the United States performed by Henry J. Bigelow, professor in Harvard College | 1852 |
| Elkanah Williams, of Cincinnati, earliest specialist in ophthalmology, begins practice | 1855 |
| Arteria innominata tied for the first time by Valentine Mott, of New York (1818) ; by R. W. Hall, of Baltimore (1830); by E. S. Cooper, of San Francisco (1859) ; and again, being the first case in which the patient's life was saved, by A. W. Smyth, of New Orleans | 1864 |
| Horace Green, said to have been the first specialist in diseases of the throat and lungs, died | 1866 |
| Centennial international medical congress held in Philadelphia | 1876 | |
| New York Polyclinic organized 1880-81, opened | 1882 | |
| Valentine Mott, of New York, reports four apparently successful inoculations for hydrophobia, performed by himself | Oct., 1886 | |
| The ninth international medical congress held in Washington | Sept. 5-10 | 1886 |
| International medico-legal congress opens in Steinway Hall | June 4, 1889 | |
| Fortieth meeting of American Medical Association opens in Newport, R. I. | June 25, 1889 | |
| Experiments with the Brown-Sequard life elixir cause the death of ten people in Shamokin, Pa | Aug. 16, 1889 | |
| The stetho-telephone is patented by James Louth, Chicago | Jan. 27, 1890 | |
| The twelfth annual congress of the American Laryngological Association meets in Baltimore | May 29, 1890 | |
| New York Institution for the Diseases of the Eye and Ear is incorporated and opened as a free hospital | Aug. 19, 1890 | |
| American Institution of Homoeopathy meets in Washington, D. C. | June, 1892 | |
| Pan-American medical congress in Washington is opened by President Cleveland | Sept. 5, 1893 | |
| Fifteenth annual meeting of the American Medico-Psychological Association in Philadelphia | June 15, 1894 | |
| Triennial congress of American Association of Physicians and Surgeons opens in Washington, D. C. | May 29, 1894 |
