Nathaniel Hooker (271)
Election date: 1768 (Elected to the revived American Philosophical Society.)Nathaniel Hooker (15 December 1737–9 June 1770) was a minister, and a member of the American Philosophical Society via his 1768 election. Born to Nathaniel Hooker (of the Connecticut-founding Hookers) and Eunice Talcott, daughter of the then governor, Nathaniel junior had every path open to him. He graduated from Yale in 1755 and two years later received ordination; he then took a post with a congregation associated with the Hartford Western Division. Although he made a mark as a talented sermonizer and served his community as a sometime medic—perhaps the genesis of his election to the APS, with which he had no substantive connection—he fell ill sometime between 1761 and 1762, and never fully recovered. In the moments when he could preach, he crafted a uniquely modern blend of biological, psychological, and theological thinking: that while the biological vicissitudes of disease rendered him irresistibly mortal, and those ebbs and flows undid the “ten thousand gay images dancing in his gayer brain,” Christ sustained what hope the soul could muster. He died at thirty-three, leaving a wife and daughter a fair estate. (PI)