Medicine: Boston Pioneers

One Sunday in 1826, a penniless youth of 19 from Bakersfield, Vt. appeared at Boston's fashionable Old South Church. The ushers looked askance at his homespun clothes and refused to find him a seat. Last week Boston felt differently about the Green Mountain boy": the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital, named in his honor and originally endowed from his estate, put on a high-toned medical symposium to mark the 150th anniversary of its benefactor's birth. The facts that Brigham once peddled oysters from a wheelbarrow and was arrested for selling liquor illegally were little...

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