school, and thence about the year 1763, it is
thought, removed to Medford. A stanch pa-
triot, seizing his gun on the ahirm of April 19,
1775, he set forth to meet the foe, anil was
killed at the battle of Lexington, being then
in his sixty-fourth year. He was Dr. Puring-
ton's great-great-grandfather. Eleazer^ Put-
nam, born in Danvers in 1738, son of Henry^
and his wife Hannah, was a farmer, and resided
in Medford. In April, 1775, he served five
days as a private in Captain Isaac Hall's company.
Dr. Elijah" Putnam, Dr. Purington's maternal grandfather, son of Eleazer and Mary (Crosby) Putnam, was born in Medford, Mass., in 1769. He died in January, 1S51, in Madison, N.Y., where he had practised medicine many j-ears. His wife was Phebe, daughter of Captain Abner Ward. They had ten children — Frances, John, Phebe, Samuel and Sidne>y (twins), Hamilton, Harriet (Mrs. Chamberlain), Mary (Mrs. Adin Howard), Caroline, and Henry Locke. Two of the sons were physicians.
Dr. Purington was early orphaned, and owes her liberal education to her aunt Mary and uncle Adin Howard, who, with rare philan- thropy, adopted seven children. From the beautiful village home of the Howards at Madison, N.Y., Louise, a child of twelve years, was sent to the Utica Academy. At nineteen she was graduated from Mount Holyoke Semi- nary and ten years later from the Hahnemann Medical College, Chicago, supplementing the course with advanced study and clinical ex- perience in the hospitals and dispensaries of New York City. It was the same bent that led the young girl, just out of school, to offer herself as a hospital nurse in the service of the United States Christian Commission. George H. Stuart, of Philadelphia, was at the head of the department, and had given to each member of the class of 1864 at Mount Holyoke, in which she was graduated, a silver pin, appropriately inscribed, in recognition of their self-ilenying gift of money — the price of the customary class badge — to the work of the c(;mmission.
At the Hahnemann College Dr. Purington took first rank, with one other stutlent leading her large class, its only woman graduate. A powerful motive prompting her to this study, at a time when the world looked askance at the woman tloctor, was her cherished belief in the ecjuality of the .sexes and her desire to see women not only entering every open door, but pushing open those that stood ajar. One who vividly remembers the graduating exercises of her class and the applause that greeted the one woman, young, beautiful, and poised, .who rose to receive her diploma, says of that bit of his- tory, " It set forward perceptibly the woman's hour." It by no means closed Dr. Purington's student life. Her scholarly habits were formed and crystallized in life and character. A signal .service rendered to her sex, which resultetl in preventing Halmemaim College from taking the backwanl step of excluding women from its courses, brought her into close relation and finally intimate friendship with Mrs. Kate N. Doggett, a social and intellectual leader in Chicago, the founder and promoter of the Fortnightly, one of the leading literary clubs of women in America. Dr. Purington served as chairman of its classical committee, and wrote several scholarly papers.
But literary and professional interests could not long suffice a spirit touched to finer issues. The temperance crusade reached Chicago. Frances E. Willard came in from Evanston to arldress a mass meeting. The young doctor heard her ringing words, respondetl to the bugle-eall of spirit to spirit, sought her leader- ship, and became her co-worker and lifelong friend. The association of that year with the great leader of temperance reform was invalu- able to Dr. Purington, opening new perspec- tives for an as])iring nature. She regards Miss Willard's influence as among the dominant forces in her life, and especially owes to it her ultimate devotion to the temperance cause. An immediate result was the formation of the first "Y," or Young Woman's Christian Temperance LTnion, at her home in Chicago.
In the mission field, also, Dr. Purington specialized in young women's work. As an active member for twelve years of the Woman's Board of Missions of the Interior, she originated and carried forward the young ladies' work. She was playfully called " Bi.'ihop of the Girls of the Interior" and popularly known as "En- gineer of the Bridge," an ingenious device in
