establish a "pock house" for inoculating against small pox. Hall's anti-federalist political inclinations may have helped him to develop a relationship with Boston physician Benjamin Waterhouse, a correspondent of British physician Edward Jenner, discoverer of vaccination. Jenner sent samples of cowpox matter to Waterhouse, some of which may have been passed on to Hall, who appears to have been the first physician in Connecticut to practice vaccination. In 1796, Hall played a heroic role during a yellow fever epidemic at Knowles Landing, south of Middletown on the Connecticut River. When all the village's established physicians had fled, Hall stayed on to care for the sick and bury the dead. His exploits were reported in Miner & Tully's Essays on Fevers (1823), a pioneering study of epidemic disease. Hall played a leading role in organizing the Connecticut Medical Society and served as its treasurer from 1799 until his death a decade later. He was noted as an educator of physicians and often had as many as six apprentices residing with him in his spacious house on Middletown's Main Street (William Brenton Hall Account Book, 1807–1809). As Federalists struggled to take control of the Medical Society in 1807, Hall and his Jeffersonian friends, who were officers of the society, became the object of a vicious satirical poem by physician and wit, Mason Fitch Cogswell: Next see arise and puff across the stage, The learned puppet of this learned age. This pious child in Middletown appears, With tongue much more supplied, than brains, or ears. . . . With him, to make young Doctors rules are vain, "Blair's Lectures" only, make the business plain, With these in hand, he turns them out as fast As tramping tinkers pewter buttons cast. Strange, very strange, that in one soul we find Such great and numerous offices combined; Surgeon, Demagogue, Preceptor, Preacher, Dentist, Physician, Midwife, Rhetoric-teacher, Moral Philosopher, Schoolmaster, all Unite & harmonize in Doctor Hall. Death According to his contemporaries, alcoholism was an occupational disease for physicians in this era. Hall, known to be a heavy drinker, began to fail in the spring of 1809. Attempting to visit a patient in June 1809, he fell from his horse and died of his injuries on June 29, aged 45. He was buried in the Liberty Street Cemetery in Middletown. He left a widow and two young sons, William Brenton Hall Jr. and State Senator Samuel H.