"DIED,
"At Lyme, Dr. Sylvester Wooster."
—Connecticut Courant newspaper (Hartford, Connecticut), Tuesday, December 6, 1825, p. 3, col. 4.
Lyme Historical Society Archives at the Florence Griswold Museum newsletter 8 Apr 2020
Dr. Sylvester Wooster (1790-1825), age 24, (actually 35 as indicated on stone) grew up in Huntington (later Shelton), north of Milford where his family members were among the Connecticut colony’s early settlers. He was recommended to Lyme families by Dr. Thomas Miner (1777-1841), a Yale graduate who settled in town in 1808... “The eligible Dr. Wooster who succeeded him, and whom Phoebe Lord described as one of Lyme’s “beaux,” married in 1818 Louisa Hayden (1801-1841), niece of Essex shipbuilder Uriah Hayden (1770-1801). The next year Dr. Wooster purchased a house with barn and shop on the “highway” through Lyme, a property that impressionist artist Matilda Browne would purchase a century later.
Six months after arriving in Lyme, Dr. Wooster had advertised in the Connecticut Gazette on June 6, 1815, his availability to vaccinate with “Kine Pock,” a still controversial inoculation that prevented the deadly disease of smallpox.[3] He became a member of the New London County Medical Society the same year and in 1823, with his local practice well established, took as his apprentice Christopher E. Hill (1803–1874), son of Lyme shipyard owner Edward Hill (1774—1828).[4] The next year Dr. Wooster had sufficient means to purchase from Christopher Hill’s father three additional acres of land north of his home on the “town street.” A “prevailing fever” claimed the life of Dr. Wooster, age 35, in 1825.
In a detailed account of the typhus epidemic that year, Dr. Miner reported that “the mercury stayed between 90 and 94 degrees for several hours each day in July in the rooms of the sick.” What he called the New England Sinking Fever raged during “the hottest season ever known in this climate” and “proved very fatal to the medical profession.” Five other physicians besides Dr. Wooster died in nearby towns in the “almost unparalleled” outbreaks of typhus in 1823 and 1825.[5] An article in Lyme’s Sound Breeze newspaper would later state that the actual cause of death for Dr. Wooster and others in 1825 was the excessive bloodletting employed by the doctors of the day.
“Robert McCurdy (1800-1880) is dangerously sick with the typhus fever,” Harriet Lord wrote to her sister Julia in November 1823. The disease, Dr. Miner reported in a published pamphlet, had prevailed in about a dozen towns in the Middletown area, with some 360 cases under his care. He found that in severe cases “opium was the most important remedy” and was “regularly administered from the very first visit.” Moreover, “the whole of those patients, whose symptoms were promptly met with opium, invariably recovered.” He also reported that “alcohol was highly beneficial in some cases, and required to be employed freely in many,” and stated that for milder cases, camphor, ammonia, peppermint, and other essential oils were occasionally beneficial. The early use of hot baths “was of great service,” with the water as hot as could be borne, as was the application of plasters, often to the forehead, “to the blistering point.” (findagrave.com)
Note: Records indicate that Louisa was the daughter, not the niece, of Uriah Hayden.