EDWARD STEVENS : GASTRIC PHYSIOLOGIST, PHYSICIAN and AMERICAN STATESMAN

Description

The life and background of Edward Stevens had excited little curiousity or interest prior to this study. That Stevens' researches as a young man laid the keystone to the correct understanding of the process of gastric digestion was little appreciated. Of his life apparently nothing was known. For Professor Fulton, Historian of Yale, he was "an obscure physician of Edinburgh". In fact he was one of the most notable contributors to the growth of the infant American Republic; a close associate of Alexander Hamilton; a Consul General of the United States to Santo Domingo; a contemporary of Benjamin Rush during the Great Yellow Fever Plague in Philadelphia in 1793; and can fairly be claimed as one of the first American Physiologists and Physicians of note. There is a presumption from the Pickering Manuscripts in Boston that Alexander Hamilton and Stevens may have shared a kinship of some sort (?). The whole impact of Stevens' life indicates that he is an important figure in American History and his relationship with Adams, Washington, Pickering, Toussaint L'Ouverture, warrants further scholarly study and examination.

First Sentence

Ten years ago when I first read the Dissertatio Inauguralis de Alimentorum Concoctione, written at Edinburgh in 1777, I could find little information about either the manuscript or the author. Indeed one authority, for whom I have very high regard, wrote me that he did "NOT THINK IT POSSIBLE FOR ANYONE TO FURNISH ANY SUBSTANTIAL ACCOUNT OF (Edward Stevens)". It was clear to me that over the years this most interesting text had received casual mention but it was equally clear that it had never engaged the considered attention of any investigator devoted to the subject of gastric digestion. Stevens himself had not excited interest and no formal historian seems to have investigated the strange and fascinating lifelong accord and circumstances that relate the lives of the distinguished American Statesman Alexander Hamilton and Edward Stevens.

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