HERSEY, DR. ABNER--Page 1

NOTE: THIS COUPLE HAD NO CHILDREN THAT SURVIVED. MRS. HERSEY, HOWEVER, IS OF THE ALLYN FAMILY, WHOSE STORIES APPEAR ON THIS SITE.

From The Narrow Land, by Elizabeth Reynard:

Summer and winter on Abner Hersey’s bed reposed a dozen all-wool fulled blankets. In hot weather he turned down one or two, using the rest as an upper layer of mattress. In cool autumn he turned down three or four; and when the winter wind howled around the eaves, he buried himself under the whole twelve. By day he wore a greatcoat made from seven calf-skins tanned and prepared by Mr. Joseph Davis, and also an inner coat and waist coat always lined with baize. He wore a shirt of the same cloth, and a pair of broad, home-made breeches. Huge cowhide boots came to his knee. His sparse brown hair was covered with a white wool wig topped by a red buff cap.

A strange apparition, the townsmen said; a madman, strangers declared if they chanced to meet him riding the roads in all sorts of weather, sometimes astride a sleek black mare, sometimes driving a carriage as oddly constructed as his dress. Built like a sulky, the carriage was closed on every side, with two small openings in front, one for the reins and one for Abner to see to guide his horse. From this equipage a hollow voice groaned aloud directions to the mare, epithets against the cold, or the sea wind, or the rain. Children hid when the carriage passed; strangers gave it a wide berth. In just such a fashion the devil himself might ride!

No physician in Massachusetts ever had a more extensive practice than Dr. Abner Hersey; no man ever secured more completely the confidence of his patients. Individual towns of the Colony, in the mid-eighteenth century, had their local physicians, but only one ‘Cape Doctor’ made rounds of the entire peninsula. Knowing his route, anxious friends of patients, and those suffering from minor ailments, waited by village green or lonely crossroad, for the appearance of a black horse, a red buff cap, or when the weather was inclement, for a carriage that looked like a giant octopus holding to a mare’s flanks by long tentacle arms.

In 1743 Dr. Hersey married Hannah Allen, and their wedding was celebrated in the old Allen house where sixteenth-century armour stood in a great hall. The Allens were aristocrats, and the doctor’s bride was not only ‘fashionable’ but ‘gently nurtured’ as well. She found the transition to Abner’s house a frightening experience; his whims and sudden passions ‘productive of no domestic felicity.’ At the end of a year a daughter was born to Abner and Hannah, a frail child, who took by storm the father’s heart and brought to the troubled young mother comfort and serenity. Abner set the clock of his days by this daughter, grudging every minute of absence; and Hannah, grown tolerant of his eccentricities, found herself happy again.

When little Mary Hersey ‘sickened of the ‘dreaded Pox’ not all the doctor’s skill could save her; and after her death his eccentricities became more extreme. He developed an insane fear of smallpox; at one time would not approach a house where it occurred. Once he visited a patient who revealed symptoms of the disease. Terrified, the neurotic physician fled from the door, rode his mare into a lather, then secreted himself in his bedroom and refused to come forth for more than a week, believing his last hours had come.

Hearse

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