DR MORRILL WYMAN'S TREATMENT OF THE OLDEST SON OF PRESIDENT ELIOT OF HARVARD ABOUT 1870

President Charles William Eliot (1834-1926), one of Harvard's greatest presidents, must have been so impressed with the treatment of his oldest son by Dr Morrill Wyman (1812-1903) that he could vividly describe it in an address almost a half a century later. Dr Wyman who received his MD from the Harvard Medical School in 1837 was a greatly loved and admired physician during the more than 60 years he practiced in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

In addressing the Cambridge Historical Society in 1917, Eliot described the visit to Dr Wyman's office as follows:

I remember taking to him one day my oldest boy, Charles, then perhaps ten or twelve years old, on whose neck I had noticed a small protuberance. Dr. Wyman looked at it, felt of it, and said—he was a man of quick observation and quick speech—"That is a wen. You had better have it right out." He said that to the boy, and immediately produced a lancet. In half a minute the little growth was out; and the doctor applied a simple dressing. Then he remarked to Charles, "There, that will cost you two dollars, because you have come to my office, but if you had gone in to get that done by a surgeon in Boston he would have charged you twenty-five dollars"; which I have no doubt was an underestimate of the probable Boston charge.¹