Author: Porter, Jacob
Biography:
PORTER, Jacob (1783-1846: WBIS)
A physician with scientific and literary interests, he was born in Abington MA, son of Mary (Cobb) and Seth Porter. He graduated from Yale in 1803, trained to be a doctor, and established his medical practice in Plainfield MA, where he remained for the rest of his life. His first wife, Betsey Mayhew, died in 1813 after only two months of marriage. In 1819 he remarried; with Sally Reed, who outlived him, he had three daughters. His first separate publication (1815) appears to have been a short memorial poem about a woman who died in Plainfield. After Poems he turned to prose translations from French and Spanish, including a work about disinfectants. But his focus was consistently local: he wrote a topographical history of Plainfield (1834) and published an article on nearby Cummington. He was a member of several scientific and practical societies and of the American Antiquarian Society. He bequeathed his valuable library to Yale. (Dexter; ancestry.com 3 Jul. 2020)