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William Douglass (c. 1691–1752) was a physician in 18th-century Boston, Massachusetts, who wrote pamphlets on medicine, economics and politics that were often polemical. ==Personal life== Douglass was born in Gifford, Scotland in about 1691.〔Bullock:265〕 Douglass studied at Edinburgh (MA, 1705), Leyden, Paris, and Utrecht, where he received his MD in 1712.〔(William Douglass (ca.1691–1752) and his Map )〕 He first arrived in Boston in 1716, with letters of introduction to Increase Mather, Cotton Mather and Benjamin Colman. After travelling in the West Indies, Douglass returned to Boston in 1718, where he lived for the rest of his life.〔Bullock:266〕 Douglass prospered in Boston, and put his money into property, both in the city and in remote parts of the Massachusetts Bay colony. Although he owned houses in Boston, he lived at the Green Dragon Tavern, which he also owned.〔Bullock:272〕 In 1746 Douglass offered the town of New Sherburn, where he had purchased a large quantity of land, $500 and thirty acres, with a house and barn, to be used to establish free schools in the town, in exchange for the town changing its name to Douglas.〔Trent and Wells:125〕〔Emerson:18-19〕 In common with other educated men of the time, William Douglass pursued a wide range of interests.〔 He corresponded with Cadwallader Colden for twenty-five years about subjects such as botany and geography, as well as medicine.〔Bigelow:38〕〔Bullock:275〕〔Bullock:290〕 He knew five languages, accumulated a collection of 1,100 American plants, observed the weather, and studied magnetic deviation and astronomy.〔Bullock:274〕 His almanac ''Mercurius Novanglicanus,'' published in 1743, has been called "useful" and "good".〔〔Trent and Wells:126〕 His map of New England, which was published posthumously, was, at least in part, the basis for every map of New England published over the following fifty years.〔〔 Douglass did not always fit in well with Boston society. He was a self-proclaimed "rationalist", and quickly joined in the growing dissent against official Puritanism in Boston.〔Trent and Wells:ix-x, 125〕 He was probably a member of the group of freethinkers (the "hell fire club") that contributed to ''The New-England Courant'' published by James Franklin.〔Bullock:282-83〕 He engaged in economic, political and medical controversies.〔 Douglass never married, but had an illegitimate son (born in 1745) whom he adopted, causing a scandal in society.〔Bullock:272-73〕 Although Douglass was a member of what may have been the first medical society in America, formed in Boston around 1735, he did not always get along with his fellow physicians.〔Gould and Lloyd:229〕〔Bullock:270〕 In 1721 Douglass described himself as the only physician in Boston with a medical degree.〔 He complained about the system that allowed someone with as little as a one-year apprenticeship with any sort of medical practitioner to present himself as a physician. He claimed that his fellow physicians were a major cause of death for their patients, and that they too often relied on a single treatment, such as bloodletting or emetics, for all conditions.〔 He is believed to be the author of a pseudonymous proposal in 1737 to register all medical practitioners in the Province of Massachusetts Bay.〔Harrington:126〕 William Douglass died in Boston on 21 October 1752.〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「William Douglass (physician)」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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