Dr. Elisha Bartlett, physician, poet, and politician, was born at Smithfield, Rhode Island, in 1805. He was graduated in medicine from Brown University in 1826, and later practiced at Lowell, Massachusetts, of which city he was the first mayor. Dr. Bartlett lectured at Dartmouth College in 1839; and two years later he became professor of the Theory and Practice of Medicine in the medical school of Transylvania University, Lexington, Kentucky. He left Transylvania in 1844, for the University of Maryland, but he returned to Lexington two years later, occupying his former chair in the medical school. In 1849 Dr. Bartlett left Transylvania and went to Louisville, where he delivered medical lectures for a year. From 1851 until his death he was professor of materia medica and medical jurisprudence in the College of Physicians and Surgeons of New York City. Dr. Bartlett died at his birthplace, Smithfield, Rhode Island, July 18, 1855, one of the most widely known of American physicians, and also well known and highly regarded by medical men in Europe. His medical works are: Essay on the Philosophy of Medical Science (Philadelphia, 1844); Inquiry into the Degree of Certainty in Medicine (1848); A Discourse on the Life and Labours of Dr. Wells, the Discoverer of the Philosophy of Dew (1849); The Fevers of the United States (1850); Discourse on the Times, Character, and Works of Hippocrates (1852). These are his medical works, but it is upon his small volume of poems, Simple Settings, in Verse, for Six Portraits and Pictures, from Mr. Dickens's Gallery (Boston, 1855), that he is entitled to his place in this work. Of this little book of but eighty pages, his friend, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, wrote: "Yet few suspected him of giving utterance in rhythmical shape to his thoughts or feelings. It was only when his failing limbs could bear him no longer, as conscious existence slowly retreated from his palsied nerves, that he revealed himself freely in truest and tenderest form of expression. We knew he was dying by slow degrees, and we heard from him from time to time, or saw him always serene and always hopeful while hope could have a place in his earthly future.... When to the friends he loved there came, as a farewell gift, ... a little book with a few songs in it—songs with his whole warm heart in them—they knew that his hour was come, and their tears fell fast as they read the loving thoughts that he had clothed in words of beauty and melody. Among the memorials of departed friendships, we treasure the little book of 'songs' ... his last present, as it was his last production."

Bibliography. Appletons' Cyclopaedia of American Biography (New York, 1887, v. i); History of the Medical Department of Transylvania University, by Dr. Robert Peter (Louisville, Kentucky, 1905).

JOHN BROWDIE OF NICHOLAS NICKLEBY

[From Simple Settings, in Verse, for Six Portraits and Pictures, from Mr. Dickens's Gallery (Boston, 1854)]