Dr. Ennalls Martin, Talbot's Revolutionary Hospital Surgeon, Helped Bring Vaccination to the County

EASTON, MARYLAND — Dr. Ennalls Martin was born Aug. 23, 1758, at Hampden, his family's seat in Island Creek Neck, and in 1777, while he was studying medicine in Philadelphia, the Revolution took him into the army's hospital service. Congress commissioned him a hospital surgeon's mate, his commission dated June 1, 1777. He was posted to the hospital at Bethlehem, Pa., then the principal hospital for the main army.

That is the account in a memoir of Martin printed in Oswald Tilghman's 1915 county history, which was compiled chiefly from the writings of Dr. Samuel Harrison. The Talbot County Free Library's Maryland Room publishes the memoir online in its collection The Worthies of Talbot County.

Martin stayed at Bethlehem for most of the war and did not resign until 1782, after the surrender at Yorktown in 1781. The memoir says he left his post only twice except to attend lectures: once to visit his parents in Maryland, and once, on orders, to Saratoga, where after Burgoyne's defeat in October 1777 he oversaw moving the sick and wounded of the armies to the Bethlehem hospital. Years later Maryland voted him a sum of more than 475 pounds, in recognition of his service and of the depreciation of his pay from Congress.

His record comes up in Veterans Day week. Talbot County is asking residents to show green lights Nov. 4 through 11, and the County Council will issue a proclamation Tuesday, Nov. 10, at 5 p.m. in the Bradley Meeting Room of the courthouse, according to a Nov. 4 county release.

Martin settled in Easton in 1783. At its height his practice extended over the whole county and into the counties next to it, the memoir says. In 1818 he handed it to his son-in-law, Dr. Edward Spedden, and moved to Baltimore, but after a short stay he returned to Easton and resumed his practice for the rest of his life.

When yellow fever was in Philadelphia in 1793, a public meeting in Easton set up a Board of Health, made up only of physicians, to inspect everyone coming from that city. Martin sat on it. The memoir says no cases were known in Easton or the county during the epidemic.

He was one of the original petitioners and corporators of the Medical and Chirurgical Faculty of the State of Maryland. At its first meeting, in Annapolis on June 11, 1799, he was elected to its Board of Examiners for the Eastern Shore. In 1818 the faculty elected him president.

Vaccination against smallpox was not used in Talbot until 1803, the memoir says. In 1802 an article in the Maryland Herald, published at Easton, recommended it. In 1803 a longer one, printed over the signatures of Martin and other prominent county physicians, asserted that vaccination was safe and effective, and the signers offered to vaccinate the poor free of charge. The memoir gives him much of the credit for bringing it into general use in the county.

Then came the disease that appeared in Talbot in the last days of 1812 and turned epidemic over the winters of 1813 and 1814. Known popularly as the head complaint, it killed no fewer than 500 people in Talbot alone in five months, out of a population of about 15,000, by what the memoir calls a very moderate count. Martin dropped the repeated bleeding and other depleting treatments then in use and turned to mild, soothing care, with what the memoir calls most gratifying success. He published an essay on the epidemics in 1815.

The memoir calls his manner with patients "rough, almost brutal." It also reflects its own era: it credits the labor of enslaved people with giving the county's educated farmers of his day the leisure to study farming.

In 1827 his son Bartholomew Ennalls Martin died. Martin gave the vestry of Christ Church in Easton the lot where he buried his son, and it became the congregation's graveyard; the memoir's notes say that ground became part of Spring Hill Cemetery. Martin died Dec. 16, 1834, and was buried beside his son.

When the memoir was written, no stone marked his grave. It was written, it says, so that his name might be rescued from entire oblivion.