Young Doctor Eastman

Teddy’s father, Edwin C. Eastman, “Ned,” died in 1892, when Teddy was twelve years old. Five years later, when he was sixteen, Teddy’s mother, Caroline “Carrie” Jewett Eastman died unexpectedly.

His aunts Sarah and Mary, and “Aunt Annie” Fields had always been solicitous of Teddy, entertaining him in Boston and at Gambrel Cottage, Annie’s summer home in Manchester, Massachusetts. After his mother died, they took their role as his family seriously. Sarah Orne Jewett oversaw that he had the right clothes for college, was attentive to his progress, and that of his friends, at school, and was a willing ear to his interests, including football.

Teddy graduated Harvard College in 1901 and four years later, Harvard Medical School, where he “first learned what it meant to work all day and ‘grind’ about all night” (Theodore Jewett Eastman, Harvard Class of 1901 Third Secretary Report, 1911). In the next few years, he traveled abroad, studied at laboratories in Vienna and working at Massachusetts General Hospital, before opening his internal medical practice in Boston.