Nathan Smith (physician, born 1762)

Nathan Smith (1762 to 1829) was an American physician, surgeon and teacher in New England, remembered chiefly as a founder of medical schools. Born in Rehoboth, Massachusetts, and raised in Chester, Vermont, he decided on medicine at twenty-four after watching an operation, trained under a country doctor, took his medical degree at Harvard in 1790 and later studied for a year in Edinburgh. He founded the medical department at Dartmouth College, where he alone taught anatomy, chemistry, surgery and clinical medicine, and he is credited with founding or co-founding the medical schools of the University of Vermont, Maine and Yale. He favored experience over theory, largely avoided bleeding and purging, and relied on supporting the body's own healing, an approach said to have saved the young Joseph Smith's leg from amputation. He died in New Haven in 1829, and three of his sons became physicians.