Until he was sixteen years old, young Parker was brought up a "plough-boy" and a tiller of the soil. From a "plough-boy" he became the "master" of a village school, "teaching the young idea how to shoot," which honest pursuit he continued for several years, until he had accumulated sufficient means to enter Harvard. He was a hard-working student, and his books were not thrown aside when he had obtained a diploma, in 1830.... As a lecturer and operator, Dr. Parker has been most successful.... Since the death of Dr. Valentine Mott, in April, 1865, Professor Parker has been elected president of the New York Inebriate Asylum (Binghamton).
Imagine, dear reader, looking back over the space of nearly forty years, that you see an uncouth young man, twenty years of age, clad in the coarse clothes and cowhide boots of an Onondaga farmer, who, straightening up from his laborious task of potato hoeing, stops for a moment, leaning with one hand upon his hoe, while he wipes the sweat from his handsome, intelligent, though sun-burned brow with a cotton handkerchief in the other. Here is a picture for a painter! Now he seems studiously observing the old village doctor, who, seated in his crazy old gig, drawn by his ancient sorrel mare, is leisurely jogging by on the main turnpike.
"Good evening, Stephen; p'taters doin' well?" says the doctor.
Receiving an affirmative answer, the doctor drives past, and is gone from the sight, but not from the memory, of the young farmer.
"And _that_ is a representative of the science of medicine!"
So saying, the young man "hoed out his row,"--which was his last,--picked up his coat, and returned to the parental mansion, but a few rods distant. This was the turning-point in his life.
It is operating-day at Bellevue Hospital, in New York city. A very serious and important operation is about to be performed. Three hundred students and physicians are seated in a semicircle under the great dome of the hospital, in profound silence and intense interest, while the professor and attending surgeon is delivering a brief but comprehensive lecture relative to the forthcoming operation.
The speaker is a man of middle age, medium height, deep, expressive eyes, well-developed brow, with that excellent quality of muscle and nerve that is only the result of earlier out-door exercise and development, with calm deportment and modest speech. "His conciseness of expression and quiet self-possession are evident to every beholder, and comprehensive and congenial to every listener."