selves as members of the same great family. In his professional
visits he never kindled the fire of political or religious
agitation and discord, nor infused into his prescriptions
the ingredients of licentiousness, infidelity, and insubordination
to the laws of God or man.
No citizen has greater power of doing mischief in society
than a physician. His character as a man, therefore, should
have great influence upon the community in determining the
measure of patronage they should give him in his practice.
Such a man Dr. Page could not be other than he was, the best
of husbands, fathers, brothers, and friends. What he was as
a husband, the grief and wounded heart of his surviving partner
in life, professor of the same faith, are a testimonial. As
a father, such was his tenderness and solicitude, that he
could not but conciliate the endeared affection of his children,
which will cause this stroke of their God, in their bereavement,
to be felt deeply and felt long.
To crown all his other excellences, in the latter part of
his life he professed the faith and exhibited the character
of a Christian. His religion partook of his natural temperament
of mind. It was unpretending and noiseless, but seen and felt.
It was an humble and sole reliance upon the mercy of God through
Jesus Christ. It was an anchor to his soul in the storm of
death.
And what life or death can be happier than that of a pious
father of a family, who having filled all the relations of
life with honorable and christian fidelity, and conscientiously
discharged his duty to his Creator, to himself, and his family,
"tenderly affectionate and tenderly beloved," and
who, leaving and honorable name behind him, and his family
without a stain, dies in the faith of a Christian, and with
an abiding hope of a blessed immortality beyond the grave
!
As he commenced his professional career with that terrible
scourge the smallpox, so his life, by a singular fatality,
was terminated some fifty years after, in consequence of a
personal infection of this loathsome disease. Nearly or quite
two years before his death, the varioloid disease was brought
to Hallowell, and either by accident or design, or both, communicated
to several of its inhabitants. A young physician--a former
protégé of the deceased, and whose ingratitude
was a poor return for the many kindnesses he had received--to
escape the danger and odium of having first communicated the
disease by inoculation, reported that he had received the
matter from Dr. P. Fortunately, however, for the purity of
his reputation, which was to pass unsullied to the grave,
two other physicians in town had obtained matter from him,
just then received fresh from a friend in Boston, which he
generously shared with them, and both parcels proved pure
and efficacious ; while his " ungrateful friend "
declined accepting any, or made use of that which was derived
from another source. Certain it was he communicated the smallpox
or varioloid by inoculation, and two young and destitute females
soon after died of the disease. As he had sown, so did he
reap. Dr. Page was summoned to their death-bed to pronounce
upon the character of the malady, and to warn his protégé
and the public of the nature of the plague thus intro-