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Benjamin Waterhouse
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Dr. Benjamin Waterhouse (March 4, 1754 - October 2, 1846) was a Cambridge physician and medical professor, born into a Quaker family in Newport, Rhode Island, in 1754. At the age of sixteen he apprenticed himself for several years to a surgeon to begin the study of medicine and then, early in 1775, went abroad to study medicine with some of Europe's best minds, taking advantage of his relation to Dr. John Fothergill of England, a prominent doctor of the time. While studying in Leyden, Holland, Waterhouse lived with future U.S. President John Adams, who had been sent there by Congress to seek an alliance. Waterhouse received a medical degree in 1780. On his return to America in 1782, Waterhouse briefly practiced in Newport before accepting a position as professor of the Theory and Practice of Physic at the newly formed Harvard Medical School, forming, with John Warren and Aaron Dexter, the initial triumvirate of professors there.
In 1799, a London physician and friend, John Coakley Lettsom, sent to Waterhouse a copy of Edward Jenner's "An Inquiry into the Causes and Effects of the Variolae Vaccine". Waterhouse was quick to see the value and possibilities of widespread inoculation with cowpox matter as a safe preventive measure against the ravages of smallpox. The vaccine had been developed in England by physician Edward Jenner, who noticed that cowpox, a disease that struck cattle, provided immunity against smallpox for the milkmaids who contracted cowpox while milking infected cows.
On March 16, 1789, he published "Something Curious in the Medical Line", his first notice of Jenner's work, in a Boston newspaper, the Columbian Centinel, and then brought Jenner's publication to the attention of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In the meantime, Waterhouse entered into correspondence with Jenner and received from him some specimens of thread impregnated with the vaccine matter. So confident was Waterhouse of the efficacy and safety of the vaccination procedure that, on July 8, 1800, he used the matter from Jenner to vaccinate his five-year-old son, Daniel Oliver, and a household servant, Samuel Carter. Vaccinations of three more Waterhouse children and another servant, Kesiah Flag, soon followed "to convince the faithless, and silence the mischievous." William Aspinwall, a local physician in charge of a smallpox inoculation hospital in Brookline, was then called in to inoculate Samuel Carter with smallpox virus on August 2, 1800, and by this process — known as "variolation" — prove the validity of Jenner's work. Two hundred years later — with the eradication of smallpox and the anticipated destruction of the remaining virus stock — that work is nearing completion. Though best known for his work with the smallpox vaccine, Waterhouse also studied and lectured on natural history, particularly mineralogy and botany.
After his initial experiments, Waterhouse went on to advocate smallpox vaccination throughout the country, but not without resistance. Like many new practices and procedures, some people met the idea of vaccination with scepticism, others with indifference, and still others with hostility. The times did not help things. Rapid transit and refrigeration were nonexistent, meaning cowpox samples - transported on pieces of cotton thread and intended for use as vaccine - sometimes arrived dead or ineffective.
Medical practices were also not as sanitary as they are today, meaning doctors sometimes inadvertently administered vaccine contaminated with smallpox, starting smallpox epidemics and creating public doubt about the vaccine.
Waterhouse forged ahead anyway, sending cowpox samples to doctors around the country and enlisting the help of President Thomas Jefferson in the vaccine's distribution. Jefferson became a great believer in the vaccine and, in 1802, began giving it to Native Americans. "Every friend of humanity must look with pleasure on this discovery, by which one more evil is withdrawn from the condition of man; and must contemplate the possibility that future improvements and discoveries may still more and more lessen the catalogue of evils," Jefferson wrote to Waterhouse in 1800.
Some of the resistance to smallpox vaccination in America, however, may have been due to its source, Waterhouse himself. Waterhouse was embroiled in long-running feuds with the Boston medical establishment, including the Massachusetts Medical Society and powerful Boston doctors, including Harvard Professor of Anatomy and Surgery John Warren. Some biographers attribute Waterhouse's problems to an innate Boston tribalism and to jealousy. Waterhouse was discriminated against because he was not Harvard-educated, they say, and he was hated out of jealousy over his European education, which made him one of the best-educated American doctors at the time. Others say Waterhouse was the source of his own troubles, describing him as arrogant and condescending and unaccustomed to the rough life in early America.
One bone of contention is Waterhouse's refusal to share the vaccine with nearby physicians and his insistence on receiving a share of the profits from doctors to whom he did send it. Some have explained that practice as an effort to ensure the vaccine was administered properly by qualified doctors, while others say it was a clear effort to profit by creating a vaccine monopoly. Whatever the source of his troubles, Waterhouse doesn't appear to have shrunk from them. On the contrary, Waterhouse met accusers head-on, sometimes in newspaper articles that, often as not, added fuel to the fire.
Finally, in 1812, Waterhouse's opponents took their objections to the Harvard Corporation, which led to his being forced out of his job as professor.
Waterhouse didn't vanish from the scene, however. President James Madison made him Medical Superintendent of New England's military bases. Waterhouse also continued his writing career, contributing many newspaper articles and writing several books, including a best-selling account of a ship's surgeon in the War of 1812, "A Journal of a Young Man of Massachusetts".
Today, Waterhouse, who died in 1846, is remembered and his achievements have not been forgotten. Images of him hang in the Medical School, and his house on Waterhouse Street near Cambridge Common is marked with a plaque memorializing him as the introducer of the smallpox vaccine in America.
