Dr. Warren was a physician, a patriot, a politician and soldier during the American Revolution. Aroused by the Stamp Act, he entered politics and became close friends and well respected by the fiery Sam Adams and the erudite future president John Adams.
Throughout the years leading up to the war, Warren repeatedly advocated for the cause of lib-erty, as orator, writer and political leader. It was Dr. Warren who drafted the Suffolk Resolves adopted by the Continental Congress in protest of the British government’s passage of the op-pressive Coercive Acts.
He delivered three well known speeches on the anniversaries of the Boston Massacre. Warren was appointed to the Committee of Correspondence, and later served as president of the revolutionary Massachusetts Congress. As an associate of the Sons of Liberty, Dr. Warren participated in the Boston Tea Party and later dispatched Paul Revere on his famous ride to warn Sam Adams and John Hancock of the approaching British army.
Dr. Warren fought in the opening military conflict of the American War for Independence: the Battle of Lexington and Concord. He died fighting in the Battle of Bunker Hill.
As we launch ourselves into the contemporary battle for freedom in medicine, no one better serves as inspiration than this dedicated physician and courageous defender of liberty.
“I am very much at a loss to know by what figure of rhetoric, the inhabitants of this province can be called FREE SUBJECTS…or how they can be said to have PROPERTY, when a body of men, over whom they have not the least control, and who are not in anyway accountable to them, shall oblige them to deliver up any part, or the whole of their substance, without even asking their consent…” — from Dr. Warren’s 1772 Boston Massacre Oration
