Lemuel Hopkins was famous as an innovative physician and amateur poet. The only doctor among a group of politically conservative satirists known as the Connecticut Wits, he was the principal author of "The Anarchiad" (1786–87), a poem that attacked the new American political system for giving power to people who had neither wealth nor education. As a physician, he specialized in treating tuberculosis, rejecting such time-honored cures as asses' milk in favor of fresh air and a healthy diet. He also turned his poetry against tradition in such satires on medicine as "Epitaph on a Patient Killed by a Cancer Quack." Hopkins was a family friend of the Trumbulls, and John Trumbull, a second cousin of the artist, also contributed to "The Anarchiad."