Autograph letter signed, to Dr. Clymer, the surgeon aboard the U.S.S. Cyane, recommending a nurse Robert Stevenson and sending with him a "vaccine scab ... taken from a healthy child who passed through the different stages of the disease finely"
Philadelphia: August 10, 1841.
Price: $450.00
About the item
1p., folded sheet with integral address leaf. 4to. Usual folds.
Item #323201
After serving from 1830 to 1833 as resident physician in the Pennsylvania Hospital, in 1836 Norris was elected surgeon to the Pennsylvania Hospital and served that institution faithfully and with distinction until his resignation in 1863.
At the time of this letter, the sloop-of-war USS Cyane, at dock in Norfolk, was preparing to leave port as part of the Pacific Squadron under Commodore Thomas Ap Catesby Jones. The Cyane left Norfolk, sailed around Cape Horn, and joined Jones in taking possession of Monterey, California in October, 1842, under the mistaken assumption that the United States was at war with Mexico. Evidently Dr. Clymer, the surgeon on board and son of the Signer, needed to hire a nurse and re-supply his small pox vaccines.
