In pursuanceof this resolve, he took up his residence in the Puritan town, as Roger Chillingworth, without other introduction than the learning and intelligence of which he possessed more than a common measure. As his studies, at a previous period of his life, had made him extensivelyacquainted with the medical science of the day, it was as a physician that he presented himself, and as such was cordiallyreceived. Skilful men, of the medical and chirurgicalprofession, were of rare occurrence in the colony. They seldom, it would appear, partookof the religious zealthat brought other emigrants across the Atlantic. In their researches into the human frame, it may be that the higher and more subtilefaculties of such men were materialised, and that they lost the spiritual view of existence amid the intricaciesof that wondrous mechanism, which seemed to involve art enough to compriseall of life within itself. At all events, the health of the good town of Boston, so far as medicine had aught to do with it, had hitherto lain in the guardianship of an aged deaconand apothecary, whose pietyand godly deportment were stronger testimonialsin his favour than any that he could have produced in the shape of a diploma. The only surgeon was one who combined the occasional exercise of that noble art with the daily and habitual flourish of a razor. To such a professional body Roger Chillingworth was a brilliant acquisition. He soon manifested his familiarity with the ponderousand imposing machinery of antique physic; in which every remedy contained a multitude of far-fetched and heterogeneousingredients, as elaborately compounded as if the proposed result had been the Elixir of Life. In his Indian captivity, moreover, he had gained much knowledge of the properties of native herbs and roots; nor did he conceal from his patients, that these simple medicines, Nature's boonto the untutoredsavage, had quite as large a share of his own confidence as the European pharmacopoeia, which so many learned doctors had spent centuries in elaborating.
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