earliest practitioners of medicine in the Province. Young Cadwalader received his early education at the Friends Publick School then under the charge of Thomas Makin. Later, his father sent him to England to pursue his studies as a physician, spending a year in the study of anatomy under Chesselden and returning home about 1731. He at once took an active part in practical movements, and as he was about the age of Franklin, perhaps the youngest of the coterie which gathered around him, he was drawn into the same line of activities, and at once threw his interests with those who were then forming the new Library company, in which he was a Director many years. Watson[1] names him as one of the physicians inoculating for the small pox in the Winter of 1736–7, others being Doctors Zachary, Shippen, and Bond, afterwards his fellow Trustees in the Academy and College.
Marrying in 1738 a daughter of John Lambert of New Jersey, he appears to have taken up his residence in that province about that time, and when in 1746 Governor Belcher granted a Borough charter to Trenton, he was chosen the first Burgess. When four years later the citizens surrendered this charter, Dr Cadwalader shortly thereafter returned to Philadelphia and upon the death of Thomas Hopkinson he was chosen 12 November, 1751, upon Franklin's nomination, a Trustee of the Academy to succeed him; and in the same year he was elected a member of the Common Council of Philadelphia and there served until 1774. In 1755 he was called to the Provincial Council at the same time as were John Mifflin and Benjamin Chew who a few years later became his fellow Trustees. He was a member of the Philosophical Society for many years, and in 1765 became a member of the Provincial Council; and during the Revolution became a Medical Director in the Army. As one of the physicians to the new Hospital, he gave there a course of medical lectures.[2] He was a signer of the Non-Importation Article in 1765, but his age precluded him from an active participation in
