Author: Joseph Warren
Date: April 6 and 7, 1771
Source: Samuel A. Forman’s personal collection. Two sided day book page fragment in Joseph Warren’s handwriting, no signature, acquired at eBay auction February 10, 2010 for $700. Partially affixed with glue onto the flyleaf of the presentation copy of a book. A separate note by Bunker Hill Monument Association’s G. Washington Warren inscribed this 1865 first edition of Richard Frothingham’s Life and Times of Joseph Warren to the Governor of Massachusetts John Andrew (1818-1867). Verification of Joseph Warren’s handwriting on the account book fragment is noted by 19th century collector of Warrenalia Ellis Ames and verified by Dr. Samuel Forman, on the basis of his forensic work with Warren’s surviving manuscripts.
Discussion: This account book page is a Joseph Warren manuscript discovery document, published here for the first time anywhere. Look out in coming weeks for additional portions of Joseph Warren’s missing account books, each discovery published for the first time here on drjosephwarren.com. Will Joseph Warren’s cryptic role in the 1773 Boston Tea Party, and other puzzles involving this influential Boston Sons of Liberty, finally be revealed?
Joseph Warren’s account books are significant to the biographer on several levels. Though some volumes are missing, survivors at the Massachusetts Historical Society comprise the most voluminous primary source in his hand. They provide an entry into the web of his professional and personal associations, his income, and the nature and basis of his clinical care. Warren’s day (aka waste book or journal) book, apparently covering his professional services circa 1770-early 1774, was reported during the late 19th century. It has been missing since.
Verso, Dr. Joseph Warren’s Account Book page fragment dated April 6-7, 1771. Author’s personal collection
I discuss Warren’s account books and offer a forensic accounting reconstruction of them, for years where it is possible to do so, in my biography Dr. Joseph Warren: Bunker Hill, the Boston Tea Party, and the Birth of American Liberty [Pelican, 2012] and in prior entries on this website. My statistical analysis of Warren’s patient volume, billings, and collections over the course of his 1763-1775 practice of medicine remains the only such analysis, to my knowledge, for any Colonial era American physician. See especially in my biography of Dr. Warren pages 49, 52-53, 88, 93, 103, 105, 139, 185, 249, 264, 317, 338, 342-343, 379 and Appendix I – pp. 335-334 for instances where qualitative and statistical analyses of the account books enable insights into Joseph Warren’s life experiences.
Locating and analyzing the missing 1770-1774 account book is an intriguing possibility. Unlike other of the missing account and day books, this one was known to have survived and to have been reported well into the 19th century. It might then have been in an incomplete and fragmentary state. Do missing and potentially discoverable pages hold secrets of the March 1770 Boston Massacre, the Fall of 1773 Tea crisis, the beginnings of Dr. Warren’s romance with Miss Mercy Scollay, and traces of other interactions not now known or suspected by historians or biographers?
The April 6-7, 1771 day book fragment documents a portion of Joseph Warren’s care as designated physician to Boston’s Alms House poor, an appointed post he held from 1769-1772. Other surviving documents in archives demonstrate that Warren was reimbursed in full by the Town of Boston for the number of visits and for prescriptions he dispensed at the Alms House. Although such billings comprised only a portion of his active medical practice, they gained for him a much larger portion of his earned income. His care for the poor was fully reimbursed by the government, while he was on his own for collections from his private patients. As challenged all physicians of the era, actual private patient collections lagged considerably from billed amounts.
Posted July 17, 2018.
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