Presented by Christine Ritok, Curator

Dr. Mason Fitch Cogswell (1761-1830), a physician born in Connecticut, who spent most of his career in Hartford County, is best known today as one of the founders of the American School for the Deaf. He helped his friend, renowned American portrait painter, Ralph Earl (1751-1801), avoid debtors’ prison by serving as his court-appointed guardian, making possible Earl’s series of extraordinary portraits of prominent Connecticut citizens. Cogswell also pioneered cataract surgery in the United States, and was the first American doctor to successfully tie a carotid artery. But it is his daily life as a practicing physician, as documented in his day books in the collection of the Connecticut Museum of Culture & History, that best shed light on the practice of medicine in New England at the end of the 18th and in the early 19th century. The content of these day books and what they reveal about daily life will be the focus of this talk.

📍 Suffield Volunteer Ambulance, 205 Bridge Street

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Meeting ID: 836 4274 7818
Passcode: History