Scope and Contents:
On July 26, 1800, "Sir John" Wentworth wrote to Dr. Lyman Spalding for a "substitute" front tooth for his wife, which had been broken in an accident and "discomposed" by a traveling dentist. He also noted the return of his own rash, medicine for which Dr. Spalding had prescribed. Another, almost identical letter from Wentworth to Spalding on the same day, is printed in James Alfred Spalding, Dr. Lyman Spalding... (1916), 63.
Wentworth, a kinsman of New Hampshire's colonial governor of the same name, wrote from Little Harbor (Portsmouth), N.H. At the time, Spalding (M.D. Harvard University, 1797) was practicing medicine in Portsmouth and participating in the founding of the medical school at Dartmouth. He later undertook to form the "Pharmacopeia of the United States."
Wentworth's letter came to the Illinois Historical Survey in 1976 from the estate of Louise Dunbar of the University of Illinois Department of History.
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