Physician

Physicians who practiced medicine in Billerica, from the colonial doctors of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to the town doctors of the mid twentieth century. Years are the years each physician is known to have practiced in town (for some colonial physicians only the year of death is known).

The early names come from the list of physicians in Hazen's History of Billerica (1883) and its genealogical register, and from Farmer's Historical Memoir of Billerica (1816), which records the tradition that Roger Toothaker, admitted an inhabitant in 1660, was a physician and that his son, grandson and great-grandson, all named Roger, were also called physicians. Later physicians are documented in the annual town reports, which record payments to local doctors for medical attendance on the town's poor, for vaccinations and for reporting births, and list the doctors who served on the Board of Health or as School Physician.