Ohio History Journal

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THE PART THAT THE PIONEER PHYSICIANS OF

THE PART THAT THE PIONEER PHYSICIANS OF

OHIO PLAYED IN THE COMMUNITY AS

EXEMPLIFIED IN THE CHURCH AND LODGE

 

By JAMES J. TYLER, M.D.

 

The church has had an important place in the development

of the frontier. The first forty years of religious development in

Ohio is full of absorbing interest and vital realities. It produced

permanent results in the establishment of our Commonwealth.

The minister of the Gospel, the lawyer, the teacher and the doctor

comprised the educated element of the community and were gen-

erally admired and respected. At one time or another on his lonely

travels, the doctor visited every household however remote and so

came to know the people perhaps better than any others. The more

the lives of these men are held up to view, the more sterling quali-

ties we find to admire.

The period under discussion witnessed the dawning of a new

era and the twilight of a rapidly disappearing old order. The past

was represented by those staunch followers of Jonathan Edwards

who still dinned into the ears of man the religious ideas and

tenets of Calvinism. In contradistinction to this rather dismal

philosophy the new order proclaimed that man should seek a full

and wholesome life, make the most of his opportunities, and en-

deavor to enlarge the bounds of human knowledge and achieve-

ment.

"Every frontier in America has been a frontier in emotional-

ism as well as in geography." In western New York, into which

the stream of immigration began to pour contemporaneously with

the movements toward the Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee coun-

try, religion filled this emotional vacuum in the life and mind

of the community. The frontier had barely begun to assume

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