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Editor's Note: The professional building housing many physicians' offices at Emerson Hospital is named for John Cuming.
Military officer, town moderator, justice of the peace, president of the Court of General Sessions, land speculator, member of Concord's Committee of Correspondence, Inspection and Safety, member of the House of Representatives, and delegate to the Massachusetts constitutional convention -- for John Cuming was all these titles could be added to that of physician. Upon returning from his medical studies abroad, John Cuming fought as a British officer in King George's war on the New England Frontier. Back in Concord in 1753, he married Abigail Wesson, and the couple had one daughter, born in 1755. In the same year, Cuming headed north again to fight in the French and Indian War as a Lieutenant colonel. He was shot and captured, and the musket ball that lodged in his hip remained there for the rest of his life. Eventually, a Frenchman arranged a prisoner exchange.
In the early 1760s, Dr. Cuming added to the two hundred acres he owned in Concord with purchases of land in New Hampshire, Vermont, and western Massachusetts. Cummington, Massachusetts is named for him. At the same time, he began serving as moderator of Concord's town meetings. Townsmen chose him ninety times between 1763 and 1788 to keep their gatherings orderly. With one noteworthy interruption. In 1774, when 80 percent of Concord's townspeople signed the Solemn League and Convenant, pledging not to consume British goods, John Cuming was not among them. As Crown-appointed justice of the peace, he had sworn to "uphold the king's law," and pre-Revolutionary activities likely thrust him into wrenching inner dialogues. Patriots took note of the absence of his signature, and over the next nine months, citizens at town meeting chose him to moderate only one of eight meetings.
However, once again, John Cuming wrestled with a decision. Maybe the tales of captivity he had told his wife had been too vivid, for she adamantly opposed his heading north to fight. His friend Reverend William Emerson found the doctor "very low in Spirits and exceedingly cast down." Mrs. Cuming prevailed, and her husband resigned his commission, devoting his energy to fighting the war from home instead. Besides his work on the Committee of Correspondence, he served as representative to the General Court, and in 1779, townsmen chose him as their delegate to the state constitutional convention, which met in Cambridge to write the constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
Artwork: Courtesy of ArtToday.
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In 1749, John Cuming left Harvard College a year before graduating to continue his education and get medical training in Britain. If the college felt slighted, it recovered, because twenty-five years later it awarded Dr. Cuming an honorary masters degree, noting his fame as physician and surgeon. 
Home once more, he established a medical practice respected throughout Middlesex County. His epitaph captures his reputation: "his hand was as charitable as healing to the poor." Story has it that he never charged a patient he treated on the Sabbath.
Always the physician at heart, after the confrontation at the North Bridge on April 19, 1775, John Cuming treated wounded British soldiers (at Daniel Bliss's home, fittingly). By early 1776, Cuming must have made his position clear, and no one doubted his patriotism. He was chosen for the Committee of Correspondence, Inspection and Safety, where he served, with a short break, until the end of the war. Just before the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the Provincial army sought experienced officers from prior wars, and the General Court appointed him brigadier general and ordered him to lead three thousand troops to Fort Ticonderoga.
John Cuming died in 1788 at age sixty and lies buried at the Old Hill Burying Ground. Among the bequests from his sizable estate, he left 300 pounds sterling, half to benefit private schools in Concord, half to be distributed among the poor. To two of his former slaves, he left 35 pounds sterling each. And, first and foremost a physician, he gave 300 pounds sterling to Harvard College, the income of which was to be used for a professorship of medicine. The college combined his bequest with other funds to create Harvard Medical School. 