Dr. Elisha Mather of Centerbrook

Dr. Elisha Mather was son and student of Dr. Eleazer Mather, of Lyme (Yale, 1738), and brother of Dr. Samuel, his father’s successor in business, and of Dr. Augustus, who practiced in East Haddam. He married Elizabeth Selden, of Lyme, and located at Pautapaug, now Centerbrook, where he spent his whole professional life, and died in 1836, aged 81. He had seven children; four were sons, and all studied medicine.

The fourth, Ezra S., studied with his uncle Samuel, and located at Essex. His seventh child, Ulysses W., graduated at Yale Medical Institution in 1823, with great promise. He succeeded to his father’s practice, and died in 1832, with consumption, aged 30 years.

Dr. Mather was engaged largely in teaching medicine, and his students for many years added life to the village in which he lived. It is said an unpleasantness always existed between the rich young men of the town and the medical students; the former gave the latter the cut at every opportunity. At one time, they got the students excluded from the favorite seats in the church. The Sabbath following, the young nobility, dressed in their thin summer pants, marched in a body to the preferred seats, which they did not enjoy long before they felt an irritation in the rear; before prayer was concluded, there was a stampede for the door. Dr. Mather was called, and found cow-itch had been dusted on the seats.

Source

Whittemore, Henry, History of Middlesex county, Connecticut, with biographical sketches of its prominent men, New York : J. B. Beers & Co., 1884.