Dr.Jospeh Adam Gallup

Dr. Jospeh Adam Gallup

Joseph Gallup, born in Stonington, Conn. in 1759 was about six years old when his father brought his family to Hartland. The means of his early education is not known but it included a command of good English, some Latin and Greek and the ability to read French. In 1787 he began his study of medicine under a “preceptor”, the method of instruction in this profession prevailing at that time. This supplemented by the required number of lectures qualified him to begin practice when he reached his 21st birthday, the earliest age when such practice could be legal. This practice began in Hartland, Bethel, and Woodstock. In May 1792 he became surgeon of the militia.

In Sept. of that year, he married Abigail Willard of Hartland, and their first child was born there in 1793. For a better location and a wider field of activity, he moved to Woodstock in 1800. He received the degree of Bachelor of Medicine in 1798, the first to receive a medical degree from Dartmouth. He received the degree of Doctor of Medicine in 1814 and the degree of Master of Arts from Middlebury in 1823.

In these years, medical societies were beginning to be formed and a charter was granted to the Vermont Society of Castleton in 1813. Dr. Gallup was elected president for ten successful terms until he refused in 1829. He was already a teacher and writer on medical subjects, being deemed the most prominent man in the profession in New England.

Dr. Gallup was the first in the use of the new vaccination for smallpox. Upon the discovery in 1796 of the much greater effectiveness of cowpox in the inoculations for this dread disease, he advertised in the Vermont Journal of Windsor in Jan. of 1803 that he was prepared to vaccinate with cowpox.

Dr. Gallup had long had dreams of a school of medicine and these were brought to fruition by the founding of the Medical College in Woodstock in 1826, of which he was the sole owner and supporter during its difficult early years. The first session of the Clinical School of Medicine was from March to late May in 1827. Midway in this session Dr. Gallup bought a plot of land and erected a building for the purpose of holding lectures in 1828. This fine brick building was the home of the medical school until 1839 when the larger building was erected on College Hill. The original building was remodeled for residential purposes.

A difference of opinion arose between Dr. Gallup and two young medics resulting in the resignation of Dr. Gallup. This so stirred the people of Woodstock that a meeting was called. A large gathering on a stormy night in Jan 1834, unanimously passed resolutions commending Dr. Gallup “Resolved that it is the wish of this meeting that Dr. Gallup would continue his efforts and use what means as he may think proper to continue the school and in so doing we will give him our support and influence”. This did not help and Dr. Gallup resigned and severed all connection with the institution.

Save for a few years in Boston, he continued to live in Woodstock, dying there in 1829. He and his wife are buried in the Wyman Cemetery in North Hartland.

–  May Rogers, 1963

founder of the Vermont Medical College

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Dr. Gallup had not the advantages of a collegiate training, although he received a very thorough education, and in 1798 was graduated as bachelor in medicine at Dartmouth College--the first to receive an earned medical degree from Dartmouth College. Practiced medicine a few years in Hartland, VT and Bethel, Windsor County, VT, whence he removed to Woodstock in January 1800. His first writings appeared in 1802 in the Vermont Gazette, published at Windsor, and attracted early attention. For three years, commencing in 1820, he was president of, and a professor in the institution at Castleton, VT, then called the Castleton Medical Academy and was also for several years a lecturer in the medical department of the University of Vermont. He subsequently established the Medical Institution at Woodstock, called at the outset the Clinical School of Medicine, and delivered his first course of lectures there in the spring of 1827. This school afterward became the Vermont Medical College and was incorporated in 1855. In 1815, he published "Sketches of Epidemic Diseases in the Sate of Vermont," to which are added "Remarks on Pulmonary Consumption," which was republished in England.He published in 1822 his "Pathological Reflections on the Supertonic State of Diseases," besides other pamphlets and in 1839 his more considerable work in two volumes, entitled "Outlines of the Institutes of Medicine Founded on the Philosophy of the Human Economy in Health and Disease."

m Abigail Willard in Sept 1792

Children:

- Lewis F Gallup (22 May 1793-)

- Harriet Amelia Gallup (10 Oct 1794-29 Mar 1867) m1 Benjamin F Mower, m2 Timothy P Fay

- George G Gallup (16 Mar 1806-)

Source:

- The Genealogical History of the Gallup Family in the United States By John Douglas Gallup

- Gallup genealogy; Gallop, Galloup, Galloupe, Gallupe (1966) 

Family links: 

 Parents:

  William Gallup (1735 - 1803)

  Lucy Denison Gallup (1744 - 1812)

 Spouse:

  Abigail Willard Gallup (1770 - 1852)

 Children:

Dr. Lewis F Gallup (1793 - 1866)

  Harriet Amelia Gallup Fay (1794 - 1867)

  George G Gallup (1806 - 1862)

 Siblings:

  Eunice Gallup Kimball (1761 - 1795)

  Oliver Gallup (1763 - 1818)

  Perez Gallup (1765 - 1808)

  William Gallup (1767 - 1828)

  Joseph Adam Gallup (1769 - 1849)

  Lucy Gallup Denny (1772 - 1804)

  John Stark Gallup (1777 - 1860)

  Elias Gallup (1779 - 1829)

Records also show another wife 

Miriam Brigham

1761–1823

BIRTH 10 MAR 1761 • Grafton, Worcester, Massachusetts, USA

DEATH 16 MAR 1823 • Melbourne, Quebec, Canada 

and 13 children. I am working on this to see if it connects.

Jo Gallup, 1769–1849.

Courtesy of the Woodstock Historical Society.

We know there were at least two students in the first group at Dartmouth who did have some medical experience. Joseph (“Jo”) Gallup, at twenty-eight, had already been practicing medicine in Vermont (where he would return to spend most of his quite distinguished career); he had also spent time in Cornish under Smith’s watchful eye.

Also worthy and less skeptical—but in the end even less like Smith in his approach to therapeutics—was Joadam Gallup (originally named “Joseph Adam,” he consolidated his two names, much as an ancestor—Benjamin Adam, called “Benadam”—had done; he nonetheless continued for the most part to be called “Jo”).¹¹ As one of the first two students to earn a medical degree from Dartmouth—an M.B. in 1798 (he was awarded an M.D. in 1814)—he stands in a critically important place in the story of Dartmouth Medical School, as we saw earlier. His willingness to put himself under Smith’s wing as an apprentice shows an admirable degree of interest in self-improvement, as does his studying later under Rush at Pennsylvania.

There Gallup was confronted with approaches to medical treatment that were diametrically opposed to what he had just learned from Smith. And although a number of students studied under both Smith and Rush, Gallup remains a prime example of those who were drawn more to Rush’s bold self-assurance than to Smith’s methodical caution. The manifest differences between Rush and Smith were not only superficial matters of personality, however. Therapeutically speaking, the contrast was fundamental. These two Edinburgh-trained professors were no doubt in agreement on some points. But Rush, ever eager to harness nature’s destructive power by bleeding and then bleeding again, had little in common with Smith, who believed firmly in letting nature take its course wherever possible. Where one of Smith’s chief precepts was that the physician should do nothing until he was certain he was right—which implied a willingness to observe, to watch and wait—Rush simply took for granted that he was right. He saw no need for delay. Gallup, with the best will in the world, outrushed Rush—to his patients’ ultimate detriment.

There is some irony in this, for Gallup was among those students of Smith who were most active not only in teaching but in founding and otherwise playing central roles in the life of more than one medical school. Appointed as professor of “Theory and Practice” at the Vermont Academy of Medicine in Castleton, he was president of that institution at the crucial point when it merged with the University of Vermont, where he taught for one session in 1825. He then founded the Clinical School of Medicine in Woodstock, Vermont, where he taught for twenty-four years. Ambitious and hard-working, he made important early contributions to epidemiology: Like Smith, he was among the first in northern New England to vaccinate with the cowpox; he collected and published clinical records and autopsy findings both from his own practice and from others’ reports; he wrote the locally popular Sketches of Epidemic Diseases in the State of Vermont.¹²Although many of the concepts in this treatise are woefully misguided, the monograph had its merits. Buried beneath the turgid prose and sometimes baffling ideas was evidence that cooperative efforts among physicians from a wide geographical area could yield valuable information about disease entities and their progress. And unlike Tully, Gallup did at least mention Smith as a reliable source about epidemics (he never referred to Smith when it came to etiology or treatment). His book would be of greater interest today if he had not devoted himself to theorizing on celestial phenomena (influenced no doubt by Noah Webster’s similar efforts¹³) and trying to explain what perplexed him by reference to effluvia and miasmata and the like—all catch-words of the then-current European theories about disease etiology.

Gallup was also active in more general professional affairs. He founded the Windsor County [Vermont] Medical Society, and he helped promote the Vermont Medical Society (he was its president for roughly a decade). The infirmary he established in Woodstock in 1827 not only served the local populace, but gave him a place to demonstrate his belief in the importance of bedside instruction for medical students.¹⁴ That principle—which showed him kin to Nathan Smith after all—may have been his greatest contribution, even if his Rushian therapeutics were such that none of us today would wish to be his patient.