Keeping well and healthy, even managing to stay alive in the unfamiliar
Virginia wilderness during the first two decades of the Jamestown
settlement, was no easy matter. In the group of 105 original settlers,
67 died during the first 8 months. During the hard winter of 1609-10
(known as the "starving time"), the population dwindled from 500 to
about 60 as a result of sickness, Indian attacks, and famine.
One of the members of the first colony was a surgeon, William Wilkinson
by name. As the colony grew, other surgeons, physicians, and
apothecaries, emigrated to Virginia. Their lot was not easy, for it
appears that they were seldom idle in an island community having more
than its share of "cruell diseases, Swellings, Flixes, Burning Fevers,
warres and meere famine."
During archeological explorations, drug jars, ointment pots, bleeding
bowls, mortars and pestles, small bottles and vials, and parts of
surgical instruments were recovered. These, undoubtedly, were used
countless times at Jamestown by unknown "chirurgions," doctors of
"physickes," and apothecaries--men who tried to keep the colonists well
with their limited medical equipment and scant supply of drugs.